I guess I did my tearing down and rebuilding a long time ago. I know what I want and where I want it. Once I've built the base system I don't change anything other than to install/remove/upgrade packages (including the kernel).
I installed Linux on my laptop. I installed it where I wanted, the way I wanted and it works pretty much as expected. There are old versions of some apps on the distro, eg Apache, which I'd like to upgrade but nobody is creating RPMs for my old version of YDL. Maybe I've misunderstood the RPM upgrade path but I'm under the impression that I probably need to get the YDL 3.0 CDs and reinstall. If I was running Debian I could use apt-get to install/upgrade/remove specific packages. It would notify me of any dependancies. I could pretty much just install woody, get online and run apt-get upgrade. Leave it for as long as it takes and come back to an up to date system.
Once you've worked on Debian machines you tend to wonder why you'd ever use anything else.
I'm running YDL on my 500Mhz iBook . Easy to install, easy to configure, all up quite good. Hardware support is fine. I haven't got the modem working yet but I believe others have.
But Debian's package management is absolutely superb. The Debian install is a little tricky and I believe there are a few quirks to the iBook setup. It'll probably take a few days before you have all the hardware working properly.
Ease of installation is probably somewhat overrated. Ideally you only install the operating system once. Day to day use of the installed OS and particularly package managaement, upgrades etc are much more important, and in my opinion Debian is the clear winner here.
HHELLLO ! ---interesting keybounce problem which I choose not to correct.
I live in this crazy little backwater nation in the south pacific which I choose to call Australia because it is called that. We have a lot in common with Americans. Like Americans we watch American TV shows and American movies. We eat McDonalds even though it's horrible and we know it's horrible and nobody likes it. Middle class white kids here seem to get about in weird baggy clothes with rags on their heads pretending to be homeboys from some LA ghetto, just like middle class white kids across America.
Probably the one significant difference I can think of is that we have this game that we like called Australian Rules football which is a type of football and the rules are Australian. And each year a bunch of Australian teams get together and play a bunch of games and after what seems like quite a few games the two best teams get to play in what we like to call the Grand Final which is like a normal final except grander and also it's the last game of the season and the winner is the best. Anyway, the whole point is that the 2003 season starts in 2003 and ends in 2003 and we call it the 2003 season.
Now I don't want to give the impression that we're all smarter than you, because we're not, it's just that we have the good fortune to live in a country in the southern hemisphere so our winter coincides with your summer and it starts and ends all in the one calendar year which is great for winter sports which are better than summer sports which are all cricket which is confusing even to us and tennis which is a form of tennis.
Have you ever wondered about tennis being treated as an international sport in the sense that people represent their country. It's not a team sport. One guy from some country or other realises that he rules at tennis and decides to play a lot of tennis because he reckons he can win a few games and the prize money is great and all of a sudden he's a national hero. If tennis was a team game with ten guys per side and they could hit one another and the rackets were much bigger and had spiked barbs and if the teams were comprised entirely of players of the same nationality and they had a World Series with teams from different countries, as opposed to an American style World Series of teams from America, then I think I'd have less trouble with the internationlisation of tennis and I'd probably watch it a lot more and I bet they wouldn't be a bunch of pansies and wear full body armour and helmets and crap like I see those American footbal players do. Have you ever seen rugby ? Rugby is a bit like American football only without kevlar bullet proof vests and crash helmets and all the players are from New Zealand and they're eight feet tall and built like brick shithouses and they scare the shit out of me. The End.
I run OSX and Linux on a few different boxes. I can't remember the last time any of them crashed. Once in awhile a process will crash and if this process happens to be related to driving the GUI or keyboard/mouse IO stuff then the machine gets a little useless for awhile, but I can pretty much always ssh in from another box, HUP the offending process and away I go. A lot of people either wouldn't know how to do this or don't have another box handy on the network so they're stuck with a reboot. So ummm my experience is that some programs crash but modern *nix kernels are remarkably stable and the OS itself tends to kind of hang in there and keep on choogling I guess is maybe what I was getting at there. The End.
Or sport. You know what I like ? Beer and pizza. Where are all the beer and pizza games ? Remember that one where the kid delivered papers ? That was a stupid game, I hated that game and you could never quite control him properly and he kept hitting the mail box and I think there were little dogs maybe I don't know but sports games I know about and I don't care for them at all, didn't I used to get beat up by sports guys at school ? And now I'm supposed to relive my worst memories of high school by immersing myself in simulations of the activities these boneheads held sacred ? That blows goats. I liked the one on the Intellivision with the baseball. The crowd cheering sounded a bit like a crowd cheering. Or like a radio tuned to no station in particular playing static. But a bit like a crowd. The capital of Finland is Helsinki.
The window server is called Aqua. OSX is a combination of a sort of closed open source BSD Unix called Darwin and some completely closed source proprietry code which includes the Aqua GUI.
Aqua is ok. It looks great, but it is very slow. I'm typing this on an 800MhZ G4 with 256Mb of memory and I'm frequently frustrated by how slowly the GUI responds. My 500MhZ G3 iBook running PPC Linux feels much faster.
I wish Aqua allowed rubber banding when moving/resizing windows. I don't need to see the contents of a window when resizing and it is hopelessly slow.
Aqua doesn't support multiple desktops. There are 3rd party apps such as Code Tek Virtual Desktop (not free in any sense) to add what I consider is an essential productivity tool
I can't run apps remotely. One of the great things about X is being able to log in to a remote host and run GUI apps, and I don't mean VNC style remote desktop hijacking, I mean a window rendered right on my desktop as if it were running locally without interfering with anybody else using the remote system.
Aqua offers a lot of eye candy for a huge hit on performance, and using the Cocoa libraries for software development is an absolute joy once you get over the hurdle of learning Objective C, but in certain key areas it's a long way behind X, and it's not really relevant to this debate because we're talking about Linux GUI options. Aqua is closed source and only runs in MacOSX on Apple hardware.
A complex networking solution ? Like say, a hub ? Or even a switch.
Your hypothetical server's ethernet interface is probably connected to a broadband connection with significantly lower bandwidth than ethernet so uploading new content isn't likely to max out your connection.
And if your web server is serving huge volumes of traffic then I guess you're probably running some kind of big fancy operation that would have the sense and the budget to run multiple servers each with multiple nics and the full load balancing shebang going on and one way or another it shouldn't be an issue.
I can't see any reason for not implementing TCP/IP over firewire, but I can't think of any reason to actually use it, other than ummmmm what if I want to transfer files from my laptop to my desktop machine and I can't find my crossover ethernet cable and ahhhhh the dog ate my hub and ummmm oh wow I've got this firewire cable and didn't Apple do some kind of TCP/IP over firewire thing ?
My iBook really struggled with Aqua. Ok it's only the 500Mhz model, but resizing a window isn't that complicated.
I installed YellowDog Linux. The GUI screams along, Linux desktops have come a long way since I last used them, and all the hardware is supported. The Airport works. It knows about the special screen brightness and volume adjustment keys. I can run OS9/OSX in MacOnLinux in a window on my Linux desktop. Multiple desktops ! Why doesn't Aqua support multiple desktops. Freeciv. Nethack. KSokoban. Is there a better Sokoban than KSokoban ?
I think what they're saying is that the Airport base station, which is an 802.11 base station, has exactly the same security vulnerability as an 802.11 base station.
Hmmm...I've been thinking of going the same way but, other than the battery problem, the iBook is a really nice machine.
Also, it runs Linux really well. X is fast. And an interesting thing is that most of the hardware in the iBook is well supported in Linux now. Apple are pretty good with publishing fairly detailed hardware specs and there are far fewer hardware configuration variations with Macs so Linux driver developers don't have to deal with the constantly moving target that confronts Wintel guys.
I bought the iBook so I'd have a portable *nix box. I'm seriously starting to think that I chose the right hardware but the wrong OS. Linux is great on this hardware.
Did the battery problem really exist ? There's no official word from Apple, just a lot of speculation from disgruntled customers. Batteries do wear out.
My iBook battery died very quickly soon after installing 10.2.4, but I use the machine daily both on and off mains and regularly have uptimes of > 30 days because I sleep the machine instead of turning it off. I suppose that's probably a little hard on the battery.
That said, since I bought my new battery (AU$275) I've been running Linux and I'm wary of reinstalling OSX.
You make a number of good points, however I'd have to disagree with you with regard the user experience.
A screen full of terminal windows running bash, emacs, vim, etc. is exactly the same on Linux as OSX..
And when you throw in multiple desktops plus the awesome speed of X compared to Aqua and KSokoban and xemacs and the massively high geek factor and OS9 in a MacOnLinux window so I can still play Civ3 then Linux is the clear winner and OSX is for baby girls who are scared of the awesomely manly charms and formidable power of Free Software, superior fire power and something to do with girls that I can never quite remember. I'm sure you can get girls with Linux. Have you seen those pictures of the BSD girls they have at trade shows. Hmmmm...... BSD girls...........and Linux just has this lousy penguin. Get away from me penguin.
All right, when I said use a good editor that was secret code for 'use emacs', but you can't make me code in lisp, it's godless and wrong and godlessly wrong and a whole bunch of other things. Look what it did to RMS.
Obviously what I meant was use emacs to hack Python code and take advantage of all those wonderful Lisp macros and whatnot that make your editing so much easier but don't ever look under the hood because Lisp will make your brain melt and leak out your ears and down to your chin where it will soften and nourish the flesh giving rise to a formidable beard such as would bring tears to the eyes of hardened hackers the world over and then accept that you'll never see a woman naked again.
QWERTY keyboard from Taiwan is so cheap it's nearly free. I wouldn't know where to start looking if I wanted an alternative keyboard layout.
Also, how many readers are concerned with WPM ? The quality of my code tends to take a sharp nosedive when I type quickly. Lots of thinking, slow typing, a good editor with syntax highlighting that notices when I don't have enough close braces, etc. Why don't more people use smart editors ?
Apple hardware isn't expensive. You get what you pay for. It costs more because it's better. I've often seen the comparison drawn b/w computers and cars. Buying an Apple is arguably something akin to buying a luxury European car in preference to a domestic family sedan. It doesn't necessarily go any faster but it has more comfortable seats, a really good stereo and satellite navigation.
Anyway, I run Linux on my 500MhZ iBook. The GUI is much more responsive and it runs all the same good stuff that comes with OSX. Like bash, emacs, python, apache, blah blah, unix wanker, etc.
I suppose Rendezvous probably finds other Rendezvous enabled machines on the local subnet. Looking in System Preferences I can't see any way of limiting that by device (eg. ethernet but not modem) nor limiting it to specific IP address ranges.
Also, the firewall configuration pane seems to be completely useless. If I'm reading correctly it seems that when I start the firewall it denies connections to any port not in the list displayed in the config pane. The list includes all the services I'm running. So if any kind of file sharing or remote access is enabled the firewall allows access to it from anywhere. The only way to prevent access is to shutdown the service. I can't make file sharing available locally without it being available globally.
Fortunately there are other options for firewall configuration. ipfw is installed by default. Might be worth reading the man page.
I've just created a new doc using Word on a Mac running OSX.
I typed "Hello." and saved. Six chars. Assuming unicode encoding that'd be 12 bytes. Plus a header and some style information to specify the font, colour, size, etc. Maybe 100 bytes total.
So why is the file 24kb ? You think XML is inefficient. Have a look at Microsoft's proprietary formats.
Not that I'm saying XML is good. XML is stupid. I was just saying Microsoft suck rocks. Big fat hairy rocks.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I did my tearing down and rebuilding a long time ago. I know what I want and where I want it. Once I've built the base system I don't change anything other than to install/remove/upgrade packages (including the kernel).
I installed Linux on my laptop. I installed it where I wanted, the way I wanted and it works pretty much as expected. There are old versions of some apps on the distro, eg Apache, which I'd like to upgrade but nobody is creating RPMs for my old version of YDL. Maybe I've misunderstood the RPM upgrade path but I'm under the impression that I probably need to get the YDL 3.0 CDs and reinstall. If I was running Debian I could use apt-get to install/upgrade/remove specific packages. It would notify me of any dependancies. I could pretty much just install woody, get online and run apt-get upgrade. Leave it for as long as it takes and come back to an up to date system.
Once you've worked on Debian machines you tend to wonder why you'd ever use anything else.
I'm running YDL on my 500Mhz iBook . Easy to install, easy to configure, all up quite good. Hardware support is fine. I haven't got the modem working yet but I believe others have.
But Debian's package management is absolutely superb. The Debian install is a little tricky and I believe there are a few quirks to the iBook setup. It'll probably take a few days before you have all the hardware working properly.
Ease of installation is probably somewhat overrated. Ideally you only install the operating system once. Day to day use of the installed OS and particularly package managaement, upgrades etc are much more important, and in my opinion Debian is the clear winner here.
Everyone who counts loves "Stuff that matters."
HHELLLO ! ---interesting keybounce problem which I choose not to correct.
I live in this crazy little backwater nation in the south pacific which I choose to call Australia because it is called that. We have a lot in common with Americans. Like Americans we watch American TV shows and American movies. We eat McDonalds even though it's horrible and we know it's horrible and nobody likes it. Middle class white kids here seem to get about in weird baggy clothes with rags on their heads pretending to be homeboys from some LA ghetto, just like middle class white kids across America.
Probably the one significant difference I can think of is that we have this game that we like called Australian Rules football which is a type of football and the rules are Australian. And each year a bunch of Australian teams get together and play a bunch of games and after what seems like quite a few games the two best teams get to play in what we like to call the Grand Final which is like a normal final except grander and also it's the last game of the season and the winner is the best. Anyway, the whole point is that the 2003 season starts in 2003 and ends in 2003 and we call it the 2003 season.
Now I don't want to give the impression that we're all smarter than you, because we're not, it's just that we have the good fortune to live in a country in the southern hemisphere so our winter coincides with your summer and it starts and ends all in the one calendar year which is great for winter sports which are better than summer sports which are all cricket which is confusing even to us and tennis which is a form of tennis.
Have you ever wondered about tennis being treated as an international sport in the sense that people represent their country. It's not a team sport. One guy from some country or other realises that he rules at tennis and decides to play a lot of tennis because he reckons he can win a few games and the prize money is great and all of a sudden he's a national hero. If tennis was a team game with ten guys per side and they could hit one another and the rackets were much bigger and had spiked barbs and if the teams were comprised entirely of players of the same nationality and they had a World Series with teams from different countries, as opposed to an American style World Series of teams from America, then I think I'd have less trouble with the internationlisation of tennis and I'd probably watch it a lot more and I bet they wouldn't be a bunch of pansies and wear full body armour and helmets and crap like I see those American footbal players do. Have you ever seen rugby ? Rugby is a bit like American football only without kevlar bullet proof vests and crash helmets and all the players are from New Zealand and they're eight feet tall and built like brick shithouses and they scare the shit out of me. The End.
I run OSX and Linux on a few different boxes. I can't remember the last time any of them crashed. Once in awhile a process will crash and if this process happens to be related to driving the GUI or keyboard/mouse IO stuff then the machine gets a little useless for awhile, but I can pretty much always ssh in from another box, HUP the offending process and away I go. A lot of people either wouldn't know how to do this or don't have another box handy on the network so they're stuck with a reboot. So ummm my experience is that some programs crash but modern *nix kernels are remarkably stable and the OS itself tends to kind of hang in there and keep on choogling I guess is maybe what I was getting at there. The End.
Or sport.
You know what I like ? Beer and pizza. Where are all the beer and pizza games ? Remember that one where the kid delivered papers ? That was a stupid game, I hated that game and you could never quite control him properly and he kept hitting the mail box and I think there were little dogs maybe I don't know but sports games I know about and I don't care for them at all, didn't I used to get beat up by sports guys at school ? And now I'm supposed to relive my worst memories of high school by immersing myself in simulations of the activities these boneheads held sacred ? That blows goats. I liked the one on the Intellivision with the baseball. The crowd cheering sounded a bit like a crowd cheering. Or like a radio tuned to no station in particular playing static. But a bit like a crowd. The capital of Finland is Helsinki.
The window server is called Aqua. OSX is a combination of a sort of closed open source BSD Unix called Darwin and some completely closed source proprietry code which includes the Aqua GUI.
Aqua is ok. It looks great, but it is very slow. I'm typing this on an 800MhZ G4 with 256Mb of memory and I'm frequently frustrated by how slowly the GUI responds. My 500MhZ G3 iBook running PPC Linux feels much faster.
I wish Aqua allowed rubber banding when moving/resizing windows. I don't need to see the contents of a window when resizing and it is hopelessly slow.
Aqua doesn't support multiple desktops. There are 3rd party apps such as Code Tek Virtual Desktop (not free in any sense) to add what I consider is an essential productivity tool
I can't run apps remotely. One of the great things about X is being able to log in to a remote host and run GUI apps, and I don't mean VNC style remote desktop hijacking, I mean a window rendered right on my desktop as if it were running locally without interfering with anybody else using the remote system.
Aqua offers a lot of eye candy for a huge hit on performance, and using the Cocoa libraries for software development is an absolute joy once you get over the hurdle of learning Objective C, but in certain key areas it's a long way behind X, and it's not really relevant to this debate because we're talking about Linux GUI options. Aqua is closed source and only runs in MacOSX on Apple hardware.
Thank you, and fuck off.
Right.....I will fight you, you dirty article reader, I will fight you and you will lose.
Damm you and your kind to hell, hell, hell.
A complex networking solution ?
Like say, a hub ?
Or even a switch.
Your hypothetical server's ethernet interface is probably connected to a broadband connection with significantly lower bandwidth than ethernet so uploading new content isn't likely to max out your connection.
And if your web server is serving huge volumes of traffic then I guess you're probably running some kind of big fancy operation that would have the sense and the budget to run multiple servers each with multiple nics and the full load balancing shebang going on and one way or another it shouldn't be an issue.
I can't see any reason for not implementing TCP/IP over firewire, but I can't think of any reason to actually use it, other than ummmmm what if I want to transfer files from my laptop to my desktop machine and I can't find my crossover ethernet cable and ahhhhh the dog ate my hub and ummmm oh wow I've got this firewire cable and didn't Apple do some kind of TCP/IP over firewire thing ?
The GUI is much faster too.
My iBook really struggled with Aqua. Ok it's only the 500Mhz model, but resizing a window isn't that complicated.
I installed YellowDog Linux. The GUI screams along, Linux desktops have come a long way since I last used them, and all the hardware is supported. The Airport works. It knows about the special screen brightness and volume adjustment keys. I can run OS9/OSX in MacOnLinux in a window on my Linux desktop. Multiple desktops ! Why doesn't Aqua support multiple desktops. Freeciv. Nethack. KSokoban. Is there a better Sokoban than KSokoban ?
Blummy heck.
Please post me one.
We don't have Walmart in my country.
I think what they're saying is that the Airport base station, which is an 802.11 base station, has exactly the same security vulnerability as an 802.11 base station.
This is very old news.
float x = 3.14159;
float y = 1.0/2.0 * x;
Value of y = 1.570795
Hmmm...I've been thinking of going the same way but, other than the battery problem, the iBook is a really nice machine.
Also, it runs Linux really well. X is fast. And an interesting thing is that most of the hardware in the iBook is well supported in Linux now. Apple are pretty good with publishing fairly detailed hardware specs and there are far fewer hardware configuration variations with Macs so Linux driver developers don't have to deal with the constantly moving target that confronts Wintel guys.
I bought the iBook so I'd have a portable *nix box. I'm seriously starting to think that I chose the right hardware but the wrong OS. Linux is great on this hardware.
Did 10.2.5 or 10.2.6 fix the battery problem ?
Did the battery problem really exist ? There's no official word from Apple, just a lot of speculation from disgruntled customers. Batteries do wear out.
My iBook battery died very quickly soon after installing 10.2.4, but I use the machine daily both on and off mains and regularly have uptimes of > 30 days because I sleep the machine instead of turning it off. I suppose that's probably a little hard on the battery.
That said, since I bought my new battery (AU$275) I've been running Linux and I'm wary of reinstalling OSX.
You make a number of good points, however I'd have to disagree with you with regard the user experience.
.
...... BSD girls...........and Linux just has this lousy penguin. Get away from me penguin.
A screen full of terminal windows running bash, emacs, vim, etc. is exactly the same on Linux as OSX.
And when you throw in multiple desktops plus the awesome speed of X compared to Aqua and KSokoban and xemacs and the massively high geek factor and OS9 in a MacOnLinux window so I can still play Civ3 then Linux is the clear winner and OSX is for baby girls who are scared of the awesomely manly charms and formidable power of Free Software, superior fire power and something to do with girls that I can never quite remember. I'm sure you can get girls with Linux. Have you seen those pictures of the BSD girls they have at trade shows. Hmmmm
All right, when I said use a good editor that was secret code for 'use emacs', but you can't make me code in lisp, it's godless and wrong and godlessly wrong and a whole bunch of other things. Look what it did to RMS.
Obviously what I meant was use emacs to hack Python code and take advantage of all those wonderful Lisp macros and whatnot that make your editing so much easier but don't ever look under the hood because Lisp will make your brain melt and leak out your ears and down to your chin where it will soften and nourish the flesh giving rise to a formidable beard such as would bring tears to the eyes of hardened hackers the world over and then accept that you'll never see a woman naked again.
QWERTY keyboard from Taiwan is so cheap it's nearly free. I wouldn't know where to start looking if I wanted an alternative keyboard layout.
Also, how many readers are concerned with WPM ? The quality of my code tends to take a sharp nosedive when I type quickly. Lots of thinking, slow typing, a good editor with syntax highlighting that notices when I don't have enough close braces, etc. Why don't more people use smart editors ?
oh, and I almost forgot - a higher resale value and you can get chicks and ...... I'll just crawl back under my rock.
Apple hardware isn't expensive. You get what you pay for.
It costs more because it's better. I've often seen the comparison drawn b/w computers and cars. Buying an Apple is arguably something akin to buying a luxury European car in preference to a domestic family sedan. It doesn't necessarily go any faster but it has more comfortable seats, a really good stereo and satellite navigation.
Anyway, I run Linux on my 500MhZ iBook. The GUI is much more responsive and it runs all the same good stuff that comes with OSX. Like bash, emacs, python, apache, blah blah, unix wanker, etc.
I suppose Rendezvous probably finds other Rendezvous enabled machines on the local subnet. Looking in System Preferences I can't see any way of limiting that by device (eg. ethernet but not modem) nor limiting it to specific IP address ranges.
Also, the firewall configuration pane seems to be completely useless. If I'm reading correctly it seems that when I start the firewall it denies connections to any port not in the list displayed in the config pane. The list includes all the services I'm running. So if any kind of file sharing or remote access is enabled the firewall allows access to it from anywhere. The only way to prevent access is to shutdown the service. I can't make file sharing available locally without it being available globally.
Fortunately there are other options for firewall configuration. ipfw is installed by default. Might be worth reading the man page.
I've just created a new doc using Word on a Mac running OSX.
I typed "Hello." and saved. Six chars. Assuming unicode encoding that'd be 12 bytes. Plus a header and some style information to specify the font, colour, size, etc. Maybe 100 bytes total.
So why is the file 24kb ? You think XML is inefficient. Have a look at Microsoft's proprietary formats.
Not that I'm saying XML is good. XML is stupid. I was just saying Microsoft suck rocks. Big fat hairy rocks.
Quoting directly from the article, "....exclusive CONSOLE rights to Doom III."