As an old Mac guy, this column gives me the willies.
Let me explain. I have issues with Dave Winer entirely apart from his writing style (best described as stoned out of his keyboard); back in the day he was a Mac developer of considerable influence who became the press's go-to-guy whenever they needed a quote about the imminent death of Apple. The man (in those days at least) felt he had an ax to grind that nobody bothered to bring up; he had major influence in the creation of Apple's scripting architecture and then threw a hissy fit because they didn't do it his way (using Frontier, of course); at least that's how I've heard the story told. Dave spent the next few years whining to anyone who would listen that Apple would go down the tubes for not doing this or that thing that he thought should be done. Saying how nice Microsoft was to him (I remember him saying something in a letter to MacTech about them sending him "bouquets") was part of his spiel. Yessir, that Dave Winer was a popular one in the Mac community.
Now here he is saying how much he hates Microsoft. This probably shouldn't shock me as much as it does, though; Dave has always been one to drift with the prevailing winds. I don't think he's one to be taken terribly seriously (admittedly he makes a number of good points in the article; it's just that coming from him they ring a bit hollow).
Streams was a failure for everyone, I think. Apple jumped on the bandwagon too; they got a drastically improved network architecture out of it, but when the Next deal went down they eventually realized that sockets was the lingua franca of network programming. No streams in OS X (unless you're still writing for Classic, that is).
Actually, it's nice to have the option to add those features; that's why I'm sure Handspring is doing rather well right now. And presenting a Unix userland to a PDA user is precisely wrong.
What seems to be lost in all of this is that Minix seems to be the way to go for such a small system. Linux takes work, maybe even a code fork.
What I simply fail to get in all this: YES, it's good that Linux is being ported to hell and back, and YES, it's nice to have an option other than PalmOS the great and WinCE the self-explanatory, why does it have to be a full-up Unix?
Here's the second biggest problem with WinCE: its interface is still bound to the desktop metaphor. I don't see how exactly you can do much better than this with Linux -- you need a GUI but a "windowing system" per se is overkill. Palm uses a few windows, but for the most part seems to rely on pageswapping to display interfaces. And Linux itself is just too damn big.
What's really needed here is an OS that's small to begin with. Minix doesn't need to be built from the ground up; just add some decent power management to the kernel, replace the console with the above-mentioned hypothetical minimalist GUI, and go from there.
Face it, folks: the only reason we want to see Linux on a palmtop is name brand recognition. It's about time someone came up with a GPLed OS designed specifically for PDAs.
(suggested moderation: -1 Flamebait)/Brian
The same thing seems to have happened to the Sega Dreamcast. Believe me, I'm not losing any sleep over it.
The fact is that DC made the elementary error of giving out a device designed for sheep (i.e. braindead Joe Consumer) through a venue frequented by coyotes (i.e. your average opportunistic RadioShack-frequenting hacker). What you're saying is to shut up, stop being curious, and let idiots have their way.
There is no point in respecting these guys; if your business model sucks you deserve to have it torn apart.
Yeah, I'd like to see MacOS X without Darwin... wait a minute, it won't even boot without the BSD layer, now will it?
The BSD stuff is a mix of 4.4BSD for the basics, Mach for the microkernel, NeXT for the ObjC/Cocoa stuff, and FreeBSD for userland. The only apple code on that layer is what had to be done to support Mac technology and that XML stuff they're doing.
And obviously you've never seen Word 5 used anywhere. Back in the day it was the one and only, and Office98 was pretty good as well (better than Word 6 although a bit bloated).
You, sir, are the kind of Mac user that makes the rest of us look bad. Or you're a troll. Or both.
Well, I look at it this way: Free (as in beer) and free (as in speech) are not the same concept, but where you have the latter the former can't be left out. (It doesn't work the other way around, though...)
This is why Apple went with a per-package licensing scheme for MacOS X Server: with the core OS (Darwin) in the public record, it would be trivial to build a new kernel that would circumvent any licensing restrictions.
More like the early Mac world, actually. You've got the mindset described to a tee, though.
The truth is that the open-source mindset has only begun to percolate into the Palm world. (I thought it was terribly amusing and ironic, for example, that the first versions of LispMe were shareware. Imagine that -- the only important version of a language that came from the cradle of the Free Software movement was payware...) I think the funniest thing about this whole situation can be summed up like this: I've tried two different blackjack games on my Palm. The one I first tried was pretty good but payware; it didn't stick around long once I found BJ's Blackjack, which is open source and a somewhat better implementation to boot.
Something I'm wondering: a couple of weeks ago the BSA put a radio ad out along the lines of "The jackbooted thugs are coming to town -- make sure your software licenses are all good to avoid a BSA investigation".
Last time I checked, they aren't a government agency -- say they did come after me. Now collections agents (I know this all too well, being a recovering college student) are empowered only to annoy, not bully. If the BSA comes to my doorstep, am I within my rights to tell them to shove it?
Tell that to the Mac community, likely about to become the largest segment of the BSD market.
BSD is small, but small != dying. The fact is that BSD won't die as long as there's still a need for an OS of last resort; the licensing is flexible enough to suit just about anybody's needs and netBSD especially has been ported to hell and back.
And of course OpenBSD is still a good security system...
Hmmm... as a serious Mac fan, I think I gotta agree with this one. Fortunately MacOS X is going to be a much more pleasant experience than the Scouring of the Shire.
Though anyone who's calling Steverino Gandalf is a little off here -- the best thing you can call him is Radagast and Saruman is much closer to the truth.
You're a bit misinformed about the 603, actually...
The original 603 was indeed a bit of a copout processor, compounded by the fact that Apple wedded it to a bus that was even more backwards than the original NuBus machines. The 603e that succeeded it, though, was actually (at least potentially) a better processor than the 604. (I use a PowerMac 6500 -- the 603e inside really is pretty slick, probably about 75-80% of the performance of a first-gen iMac.) If you don't need MP, the 603e is the way to go.
To those of you who didn't get it, ST:TMP was two things: the final gasp of the aborted Star Trek Phase 2 TV series (in which Cmdr. Will Decker was supposed to play a major part) and a blatant rehash of the plot of "the changeling" with Vger substituted for Nomad. There was a lot of stuff in Gene Roddenberry's original vision that never made it on screen as well; read the novelization (penned by Gene himself) and you'll probably understand why.
My thought on the matter is that what it's really owed is a proper title like Star Wars: A New Hope had (but never really publicized) as well as a recut.
I've been thinking I might do that myself, actually; I'm not a big Basic fan at all, but I do have source code to an old Basic interpreter, and I'd like to do a bit of DC development, and it *is* traditional to have Basic on old computers like that...
So, if anyone who happens to be reading this happens to have a CD-R, I've been thinking of doing a Dreamcast Basic but I don't have the ability to download either netBSD/dreamcast or Dreamcast Linux; contact me if you're interested...
Plan 9 on the Dreamcast would be a beautiful thing, actually...
I've been contemplating the old/. joke about "I'd love to see a beowulf of those things!". At $160 a pop ($99 + the price of a broadband adapter) a Dreamcast could be an excellent network computer or node in a cluster. I don't quite remember the specs on the thing, but they're quite impressive, and you can do all your file storage via NFS (or, on Plan 9, just using the distributed capabilities of the system)...
Which is why you want open-source OSes on your DC too. Face it -- the Dreamcast is dead, and that's why it only costs $99. But at the same time that's a great incentive to buy one and start hacking away. Open Source OS means that Dreamcast owners might still be getting new games (at least as shareware/freeware) years from now.
BTW, does anyone know if the Dreamcast CD-ROM can read CD-RWs (at least the unhacked ones that haven't had CD support removed)?
Jef Raskin seems to be arguing a straw man point. There has been a system with a truly seamless interface -- it was called the Newton. In theory it was quite elegant, but it was too seamless.
To those of you who haven't used a Newton, this will take some explaining. The Newton had a very clean metaphor based on a roll of paper; it implemented it very well, but if you use one for any great length of time you realize that trying to graft simple computer functions like cut and paste on top of that interface is painfully awkward. Compounding the problem is that there was no particularly clear central jumping-off point in the system (as there is in PalmOS); even adapting OpenDoc to the Newton interface would have been far more flexible (and probably even nicer than the Palm interface) than what Apple had.
Raskin's reputation was built on extreme simplicity -- he didn't even want the mouse that Steve Jobs insisted on, and the ensuing power struggle wound up with Raskin leaving Apple. Raskin's points are well-taken, but the thing that seems to have hurt him is a failure to understand that elegant != perfect; look at Perl, for example.
My take on it is this: if you are creating a completely closed box, then Raskin's points are valid -- you know everything you need it to do, so you design accordingly. You want that, you go buy an Audrey or a Sharp Wizard. But it's very hard to create a seamless design that still allows for expandability; if that's what he's arguing for, he should put his money where his mouth is, start doing some Darwin/X hacking, and build his own MacOS from scratch.
Uh... you ever actually *used* gopher? It only sort of resembles WWW, and there is no concept whatsoever of what we'd call a hyperlink. It's purely menu driven.
Though I'm amazed that CMGI would get the patents as well... with them getting naming rights over the new Pats stadium I kinda get the feeling they might try to patent hash marks and goalposts...
Slashdot Mirror
Still commercial, though.
/Brian
He used to be a lot worse; back in the day (about 1996) his style was so disjointed that you'd think he was stoned. /Brian
As an old Mac guy, this column gives me the willies.
Let me explain. I have issues with Dave Winer entirely apart from his writing style (best described as stoned out of his keyboard); back in the day he was a Mac developer of considerable influence who became the press's go-to-guy whenever they needed a quote about the imminent death of Apple. The man (in those days at least) felt he had an ax to grind that nobody bothered to bring up; he had major influence in the creation of Apple's scripting architecture and then threw a hissy fit because they didn't do it his way (using Frontier, of course); at least that's how I've heard the story told. Dave spent the next few years whining to anyone who would listen that Apple would go down the tubes for not doing this or that thing that he thought should be done. Saying how nice Microsoft was to him (I remember him saying something in a letter to MacTech about them sending him "bouquets") was part of his spiel. Yessir, that Dave Winer was a popular one in the Mac community.
Now here he is saying how much he hates Microsoft. This probably shouldn't shock me as much as it does, though; Dave has always been one to drift with the prevailing winds. I don't think he's one to be taken terribly seriously (admittedly he makes a number of good points in the article; it's just that coming from him they ring a bit hollow).
/Brian
Streams was a failure for everyone, I think. Apple jumped on the bandwagon too; they got a drastically improved network architecture out of it, but when the Next deal went down they eventually realized that sockets was the lingua franca of network programming. No streams in OS X (unless you're still writing for Classic, that is).
/Brian
Short reason: Minix is open-source as well (BSD, though, not GPL) and a lot smaller than Linux. Much less to cut out.
/Brian
Actually, it's nice to have the option to add those features; that's why I'm sure Handspring is doing rather well right now. And presenting a Unix userland to a PDA user is precisely wrong.
/Brian
What seems to be lost in all of this is that Minix seems to be the way to go for such a small system. Linux takes work, maybe even a code fork. What I simply fail to get in all this: YES, it's good that Linux is being ported to hell and back, and YES, it's nice to have an option other than PalmOS the great and WinCE the self-explanatory, why does it have to be a full-up Unix? Here's the second biggest problem with WinCE: its interface is still bound to the desktop metaphor. I don't see how exactly you can do much better than this with Linux -- you need a GUI but a "windowing system" per se is overkill. Palm uses a few windows, but for the most part seems to rely on pageswapping to display interfaces. And Linux itself is just too damn big. What's really needed here is an OS that's small to begin with. Minix doesn't need to be built from the ground up; just add some decent power management to the kernel, replace the console with the above-mentioned hypothetical minimalist GUI, and go from there. Face it, folks: the only reason we want to see Linux on a palmtop is name brand recognition. It's about time someone came up with a GPLed OS designed specifically for PDAs. (suggested moderation: -1 Flamebait) /Brian
The same thing seems to have happened to the Sega Dreamcast. Believe me, I'm not losing any sleep over it.
The fact is that DC made the elementary error of giving out a device designed for sheep (i.e. braindead Joe Consumer) through a venue frequented by coyotes (i.e. your average opportunistic RadioShack-frequenting hacker). What you're saying is to shut up, stop being curious, and let idiots have their way.
There is no point in respecting these guys; if your business model sucks you deserve to have it torn apart.
/Brian
Yeah, I'd like to see MacOS X without Darwin... wait a minute, it won't even boot without the BSD layer, now will it?
The BSD stuff is a mix of 4.4BSD for the basics, Mach for the microkernel, NeXT for the ObjC/Cocoa stuff, and FreeBSD for userland. The only apple code on that layer is what had to be done to support Mac technology and that XML stuff they're doing.
And obviously you've never seen Word 5 used anywhere. Back in the day it was the one and only, and Office98 was pretty good as well (better than Word 6 although a bit bloated).
You, sir, are the kind of Mac user that makes the rest of us look bad. Or you're a troll. Or both.
/Brian
Well, I look at it this way: Free (as in beer) and free (as in speech) are not the same concept, but where you have the latter the former can't be left out. (It doesn't work the other way around, though...)
This is why Apple went with a per-package licensing scheme for MacOS X Server: with the core OS (Darwin) in the public record, it would be trivial to build a new kernel that would circumvent any licensing restrictions.
/Brian
More like the early Mac world, actually. You've got the mindset described to a tee, though.
The truth is that the open-source mindset has only begun to percolate into the Palm world. (I thought it was terribly amusing and ironic, for example, that the first versions of LispMe were shareware. Imagine that -- the only important version of a language that came from the cradle of the Free Software movement was payware...) I think the funniest thing about this whole situation can be summed up like this: I've tried two different blackjack games on my Palm. The one I first tried was pretty good but payware; it didn't stick around long once I found BJ's Blackjack, which is open source and a somewhat better implementation to boot.
/brian
Software schmoftware. Y'all still have Nortel, eh?
(to the humor-impaired moderator, you'll want to use -1 Flamebait...)
/Brian
Something I'm wondering: a couple of weeks ago the BSA put a radio ad out along the lines of "The jackbooted thugs are coming to town -- make sure your software licenses are all good to avoid a BSA investigation".
Last time I checked, they aren't a government agency -- say they did come after me. Now collections agents (I know this all too well, being a recovering college student) are empowered only to annoy, not bully. If the BSA comes to my doorstep, am I within my rights to tell them to shove it?
/Brian
Tell that to the Mac community, likely about to become the largest segment of the BSD market.
BSD is small, but small != dying. The fact is that BSD won't die as long as there's still a need for an OS of last resort; the licensing is flexible enough to suit just about anybody's needs and netBSD especially has been ported to hell and back.
And of course OpenBSD is still a good security system...
/Brian
Hmmm... as a serious Mac fan, I think I gotta agree with this one. Fortunately MacOS X is going to be a much more pleasant experience than the Scouring of the Shire.
Though anyone who's calling Steverino Gandalf is a little off here -- the best thing you can call him is Radagast and Saruman is much closer to the truth.
/Brian
Actually, you're only sort of right -- don't forget, Mach is only the low-level part of the kernel. There's a good chunk of 4.4BSD in there as well.
The really odd thing about MacOS X in relation to other unices is Apple's rather flexible definition of "kernel"...
/Brian
You're a bit misinformed about the 603, actually...
The original 603 was indeed a bit of a copout processor, compounded by the fact that Apple wedded it to a bus that was even more backwards than the original NuBus machines. The 603e that succeeded it, though, was actually (at least potentially) a better processor than the 604. (I use a PowerMac 6500 -- the 603e inside really is pretty slick, probably about 75-80% of the performance of a first-gen iMac.) If you don't need MP, the 603e is the way to go.
/Brian
To those of you who didn't get it, ST:TMP was two things: the final gasp of the aborted Star Trek Phase 2 TV series (in which Cmdr. Will Decker was supposed to play a major part) and a blatant rehash of the plot of "the changeling" with Vger substituted for Nomad. There was a lot of stuff in Gene Roddenberry's original vision that never made it on screen as well; read the novelization (penned by Gene himself) and you'll probably understand why.
My thought on the matter is that what it's really owed is a proper title like Star Wars: A New Hope had (but never really publicized) as well as a recut.
/Brian
BSD doesn't have cool points anymore. Mind you, it's great stuff; it just doesn't get the buzz it did in, say, 1983.
/Brian
I've been thinking I might do that myself, actually; I'm not a big Basic fan at all, but I do have source code to an old Basic interpreter, and I'd like to do a bit of DC development, and it *is* traditional to have Basic on old computers like that...
So, if anyone who happens to be reading this happens to have a CD-R, I've been thinking of doing a Dreamcast Basic but I don't have the ability to download either netBSD/dreamcast or Dreamcast Linux; contact me if you're interested...
/Brian
connorbd@yahoo.com
Plan 9 on the Dreamcast would be a beautiful thing, actually...
/. joke about "I'd love to see a beowulf of those things!". At $160 a pop ($99 + the price of a broadband adapter) a Dreamcast could be an excellent network computer or node in a cluster. I don't quite remember the specs on the thing, but they're quite impressive, and you can do all your file storage via NFS (or, on Plan 9, just using the distributed capabilities of the system)...
I've been contemplating the old
/Brian
Which is why you want open-source OSes on your DC too. Face it -- the Dreamcast is dead, and that's why it only costs $99. But at the same time that's a great incentive to buy one and start hacking away. Open Source OS means that Dreamcast owners might still be getting new games (at least as shareware/freeware) years from now.
BTW, does anyone know if the Dreamcast CD-ROM can read CD-RWs (at least the unhacked ones that haven't had CD support removed)?
/Brian
Such a beast existed at one time. It was called OpenDoc.
/Brian
Jef Raskin seems to be arguing a straw man point. There has been a system with a truly seamless interface -- it was called the Newton. In theory it was quite elegant, but it was too seamless.
To those of you who haven't used a Newton, this will take some explaining. The Newton had a very clean metaphor based on a roll of paper; it implemented it very well, but if you use one for any great length of time you realize that trying to graft simple computer functions like cut and paste on top of that interface is painfully awkward. Compounding the problem is that there was no particularly clear central jumping-off point in the system (as there is in PalmOS); even adapting OpenDoc to the Newton interface would have been far more flexible (and probably even nicer than the Palm interface) than what Apple had.
Raskin's reputation was built on extreme simplicity -- he didn't even want the mouse that Steve Jobs insisted on, and the ensuing power struggle wound up with Raskin leaving Apple. Raskin's points are well-taken, but the thing that seems to have hurt him is a failure to understand that elegant != perfect; look at Perl, for example.
My take on it is this: if you are creating a completely closed box, then Raskin's points are valid -- you know everything you need it to do, so you design accordingly. You want that, you go buy an Audrey or a Sharp Wizard. But it's very hard to create a seamless design that still allows for expandability; if that's what he's arguing for, he should put his money where his mouth is, start doing some Darwin/X hacking, and build his own MacOS from scratch.
/Brian
Uh... you ever actually *used* gopher? It only sort of resembles WWW, and there is no concept whatsoever of what we'd call a hyperlink. It's purely menu driven.
Though I'm amazed that CMGI would get the patents as well... with them getting naming rights over the new Pats stadium I kinda get the feeling they might try to patent hash marks and goalposts...
/Brian