Yeah, but the BSD that's on it is the mutant survivor of a Mach 3 collision... I'm thinking about putting an "unimpacted" BSD on it (but to be honest I'll probaby just use linux).
The thing that annoys me most about Dells is how much they weigh. But that's just a pet peeve:).
I don't dislike OSX, I don't dislike Apple, but their hardware has historically been expensive. Including the mac mini, in my experience... I bet we'll see something more cost effective in an Intel architecture soon.
It's too bad IBM and Motorola couldn't keep up with AMD and Intel. It's too bad DEC wasn't able to get their Alpha technology (which Intel has ended up bastardizing) into a commodity market. There are some really lame "features" in the x86 architecture that have become institutionalized.
Anyway, I'll eventually get around to putting BSD or linux on the mac mini and then I should be able to make a comparison that'll be more interesting to you. I'm guessing it'll boil down to the same thing, though - if the Mac interface is valuable to you, buy it, otherwise use a different interface and save money.
What didn't "just plug in and work"? You didn't say that.
Oh, a bunch of stuff. I couldn't compile code without hours of additional installation (some of which had to be retrieved from the Internet, but that's probably been fixed on the currently shipping model). Um, OpenLDAP required expert work, too. The whole CD player/iTunes thing was annoying, but turned out to be memory starvation. I don't think the samba implementation picked up the NetBIOS name resolution mode from DHCP - I don't think anything does except a (very few) versions of MSWindows - but I won't swear to that one since I don't remember what the tweaks were I had to make in samba.
You're using a Mac mini for software development? Um, dude, OK, you can do that... but that's not exactly a $300 PC job.
Under MSwindows it's not a $300 PC job, but you're getting close at $600, and you can do major software devel on a 486 with 16 MB if you know how to use a linux or BSD system from the CLI. I salvaged all the computers I have at home, incidentally - a couple of hours of dumpster diving was the total cost to me.
But, you do make a good point - out of the box, the machine is not suitable for my kind of use, and Apple never said it was, either. I was purposely testing it beyond the vendor's paradigm and the mac afficionados really don't need to get upset that I didn't have a religous epiphany as soon as I touched the case.
[some stuff about Windows costs redacted]
The cost of an Xserver, or any of the other apps people have mentioned, are $0.00 on the PC platforms I use; they are also negligible on my linux laptop (there is a hidden cost there in terms of my labor, since Xwindows installation on a laptop is not usually plug-n-play like it is on cheap generic hardware).
Double [memory] is more than enough unless you're building a compile engine or something,
Thanks for the info (really!)... once I realised the problems I was having were basically symptoms of memory starvation, I jumped it up to 4X based on what some other users were saying on the 'net. I din't want to have to do it twice:).
I do need to be able to compile major code, but as you mentioned all the cheap machines require memory upgrades, regardless of architecture. Hard to believe we tested the Peacekeeper missile's launch system on a machine with 1 MB of RAM total!
And don't forget the value of "it just works". My daughter switched from a PC to an old iMac. She ended up really abusing the Mac... going in and randomly deleting files from/Applications to make space... and it kept on "just working". Her PC, I'd been having to reinstall every 3-6 months. That's why it's worth a bit more... the PC may be priced like an appliance, but the Mac is an appliance.
As for anecdotal evidence, well, there's no doubt that individual users have different bad habits and comfort levels. I find that GUIs are slow, limiting, and crash-prone because I am comfortable with a CLI; my sister greatly prefers MSwindows (she is an author, musician and former Apple user) and my father prefers MacOS (he is a retired rocket scientist who has used mainframes, DOS PCs, and most versions of windows). Each of us can validly claim "it just works" because that's true for each of us in his or her most comfortable creative environment.
Apple isn't building a computer for the special needs of one person but a wide selection of needs.
That also wasn't my experience.
I found the Mac Mini (note, I am not trying to generalize to all macs, since this is the only OSX machine I have tested extensively) to be focused on providing access to commercial media streams (like iTunes, for example) and some simplistic home audio/video applications (GarageBand etc). I did not find it to be easily adaptable to my own "wide range of needs".
Please note I'm not defending Dell, or PCs - you are making all kinds of comparisons as if I'd said Dell PCs are the shizzle. That's not my premise.
I'm simply saying that the Mac Mini, in my experience, requires more expenditure than the list price to make it comparable to a $300 PC running linux or BSD. In the end you'll spend roughly $600, so that's roughly twice the cost.
Why does that bother you? If Macs are better, which you seem to be saying, why shouldn't they cost more?
And it really does just "plug in and work", like an appliance.
That has not been my experience.
I got my employers to buy me a mac mini for evaluation purposes. The idea was to put the code developers on native Xwindows instead installing Xservers on Windows XP systems.
You can't do anything meaningful with a mac mini until you quadruple the memory, was what I found. Once you do that (and buy keyboard/mouse/monitor) the mac mini costs about twice what a comparable PC costs.
At the prices we're talking about, though, twice as much is not a big deal if you really want the Mac interface. Some people prefer it, so they will pay $300 extra for it...
Sadly, the evolution of the English language nowadays seems to be directed by bad science fiction and gory video games. Real rail guns were projectile weapons so large they must be transported by rail - they can't be towed or moved with a truck without being disassembled because they are too heavy for roadbeds - and they have names like "Gustav", "Big Bertha" and "Schlanke Emma".
If the Z-machine was a gun (which it's not) it oughta be called a capacitive discharge cannon, not a rail gun. But I guess that's too hard to spell for kids today?
Those who ignore history are apparently in charge of revising the english language. Wikipedia and dictionary.com both use the "new" definition of railgun (although at least wiki has the grace to mention real railguns in passing).
Future historians are going to hate us for this one.
The way I use the English language, when I quote someone and then say this is completely wrong it means all parts of the quoted text are incorrect. If I meant the conclusion was wrong, or some individual premise was wrong, I'd use the word partly instead of completely. That is why your post confused me.
As for OSX performance, I suggest you look at some tables of actual measurements (such as these from IBM. In the real world, the numbers work out just like I said they would - although I admit I made my statements based on my own experience compiling the same code on a G4 and a Pentium PC running Red Hat linux, without any rigorous benchmarking.
I said, "OSX hacks a BSD kernel into a Mach microkernel, and thus performance is nearly as bad as Mach despite the existence of the mature, standardized interfaces of a BSD."
and you said "This is completely wrong."
So, you claim that OSX is NOT comprised of a BSD kernel hacked into a Mach microkernel? And that the performance is worse than Mach? Or maybe that performance of the hybrid kernel is better than a monolith?
Or is there some new meaning of the word "completely" that I haven't heard yet?
I don't think we have any disagreement... although, to me, OSX "feels" slow, probably because I do 99% of my work in a text window under X11.
For example, the GUI is use has little or no effect on compiling OpenLDAP against SASL and Kerberos and loading a huge directory into the resultant software. It's pretty much kernel and hardware.
That comparison is easy. OSX hacks a BSD kernel into a Mach microkernel, and thus performance is nearly as bad as Mach despite the existence of the mature, standardized interfaces of a BSD.
MacOSX is not about performance. It's about interface. I don't think Apple (or Next for that matter) has ever tried to deny their intention to overcome the performance problems caused by tremendously complex software through the use of immensely powerful hardware.
When computers respond correctly to human language, then the "caveman interface" will no longer be needed.
When humans start using language correctly, that will be possible. You're reinforcing Moglen's point; the GUI represents a "dumbing down" of interfaces which means abandoning the idea of "smartening up" the users. Instead of using computers in a way that enhances and evolves the human linguistic interface, we restrict the computer to a level that children have already surpassed.
Any interface that sucks for everybody who doesn't spend years learning it... just plain sucks.
False. The interface of netcat is appropriate to its function, and nobody who hasn't spent years learning the intricacies of network protocols at the packet level can possibly use it. You can't use sing if you don't understand how ICMP rides herd on IP, and once you've reached that level of understanding the CLI interface is intuitive and a GUI simply restricts your creative abilities.
Is there something that will come along and be better than the GUI? Damn, I sure hope so. Was it a big step forward? Hell, yeah.
I can only think of one thing you can't do more efficiently with a CLI (draw pictures) but then again I've always preferred CLIs (because they are so much faster and less restrictive) so I'm probably not the right person to ask.
Anyway, the existence of even one thing that the GUI does "better" still proves the point; that GUIs aren't useless.
Incidentally, my prior post was supposed have a link to Eben Moglen's interview here where he says "What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user." but I mis-moused it somehow.
I have experience with Exchange and Sendmail, and some familiarity with a number of other systems including postfix and PMDF.
I do not find any basis for your claim in my experience; AFAIK, for "giving access to mailboxes to those who need it" Exchange is pretty much equivalent to everything else out there.
Can you explain to me how you came to the conclusion that Exhange is "the best thing for this", as you put it?
In theory, yes, you are right. You should be able to just configure your client to reject connection when the host keys are changed, and provide the keys to clients via a secure channel like floppy, USB, or whatever (I recommend putting the SSH host public keys and wireless encryption keys on a CD, even though it's a huge waste of space. Some of my cow-orkers use a USB stick for this).
In practice, there are always rumors of SSH M-i-t-Ms going around, and some of the rumors always turn out to be true, although they are usually restricted to specific implementions or to specific encryption methods. For example, I use PuTTY to connect from windows boxen; in versions of PuTTY prior to 0.56 a M-i-t-M can simply replace your host key files during session startup, before host key verification is even begun. But if your AP OS is sufficiently esoteric or space-limited, an attacker will not be able to insert code to do this without breaking the wireless functions.
So, using dumb APs is another layer in the "defense in depth" strategy. You should have a virus scanner too...
When my son started kindergarten (the first public-funded educational level in the USA) I went to a "Parent's Open House" meeting with all the other drones.
Just for my own amusement, I counted the number of times each speaker (the high school principal, various members of the administrative and teaching staff) mentioned God or faith, and compared it to the number of times they mentioned learning or education.
Afterwards I had to take a shower. I honestly don't think anyone else noticed - except possibly a Hindu gentleman, who was clearly as uncomfortable as I was.
It's gotten noticeably worse since the WTC atrocity; there are "God Bless America" stickers all over the damned place. And every school in the district still says "under God" in the pledge of allegiance every morning, and the atheist kids who won't say the pledge still get beaten up by their peers just like they did when I was a child.
128-bit WEP, no SSID broadcast (aka "stealth mode") and connect the access point via a crossover cable to an ethernet card on a stripped-down linux box that firewalls all ports except 22.
On the laptops use a little script that does an SSH login (user supplies password, never stored anywhere) and then forwards the SMB/CIFS, IMAPS, DNS, and SMTP-AUTH ports over the SSH connection.
Make sure the access point is very "dumb" - that is, it doesn't have enough memory or OS to allow an attacker who compromises the AP itself to install an SSH M-i-t-M sploit. I use weird Intel and Enterasys boxes (pulled out of dumpsters) that haven't got real OSes anyway.
If I've ever been cracked, it was done so gracefully I haven't even noticed... and since my neighbors don't even run WEP it's unlikely that I'd even be noticed much less targeted.
Oh, and most importantly: Don't use default passwords, and KEEP YOUR PATCHLEVELS UP TO DATE!
Seriously, man, grow a spine. Your organization - which is apparently funded by my tax dollars - needs to be reported to los federales. Your management's behaviour is criminal if your post is correct - so do your job, and your duty as a citizen, and turn the bastards in. Look up "anonymous whistle blower" in the federal phone book or consult Google for how to do it.
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The thing that annoys me most about Dells is how much they weigh. But that's just a pet peeve :).
I don't dislike OSX, I don't dislike Apple, but their hardware has historically been expensive. Including the mac mini, in my experience... I bet we'll see something more cost effective in an Intel architecture soon.
It's too bad IBM and Motorola couldn't keep up with AMD and Intel. It's too bad DEC wasn't able to get their Alpha technology (which Intel has ended up bastardizing) into a commodity market. There are some really lame "features" in the x86 architecture that have become institutionalized.
Anyway, I'll eventually get around to putting BSD or linux on the mac mini and then I should be able to make a comparison that'll be more interesting to you. I'm guessing it'll boil down to the same thing, though - if the Mac interface is valuable to you, buy it, otherwise use a different interface and save money.
Under MSwindows it's not a $300 PC job, but you're getting close at $600, and you can do major software devel on a 486 with 16 MB if you know how to use a linux or BSD system from the CLI. I salvaged all the computers I have at home, incidentally - a couple of hours of dumpster diving was the total cost to me.
But, you do make a good point - out of the box, the machine is not suitable for my kind of use, and Apple never said it was, either. I was purposely testing it beyond the vendor's paradigm and the mac afficionados really don't need to get upset that I didn't have a religous epiphany as soon as I touched the case.
The cost of an Xserver, or any of the other apps people have mentioned, are $0.00 on the PC platforms I use; they are also negligible on my linux laptop (there is a hidden cost there in terms of my labor, since Xwindows installation on a laptop is not usually plug-n-play like it is on cheap generic hardware).
Thanks for the info (really!)... once I realised the problems I was having were basically symptoms of memory starvation, I jumped it up to 4X based on what some other users were saying on the 'net. I din't want to have to do it twice
I do need to be able to compile major code, but as you mentioned all the cheap machines require memory upgrades, regardless of architecture. Hard to believe we tested the Peacekeeper missile's launch system on a machine with 1 MB of RAM total!
As for anecdotal evidence, well, there's no doubt that individual users have different bad habits and comfort levels. I find that GUIs are slow, limiting, and crash-prone because I am comfortable with a CLI; my sister greatly prefers MSwindows (she is an author, musician and former Apple user) and my father prefers MacOS (he is a retired rocket scientist who has used mainframes, DOS PCs, and most versions of windows). Each of us can validly claim "it just works" because that's true for each of us in his or her most comfortable creative environment.
I found the Mac Mini (note, I am not trying to generalize to all macs, since this is the only OSX machine I have tested extensively) to be focused on providing access to commercial media streams (like iTunes, for example) and some simplistic home audio/video applications (GarageBand etc). I did not find it to be easily adaptable to my own "wide range of needs".
Please note I'm not defending Dell, or PCs - you are making all kinds of comparisons as if I'd said Dell PCs are the shizzle. That's not my premise.
I'm simply saying that the Mac Mini, in my experience, requires more expenditure than the list price to make it comparable to a $300 PC running linux or BSD. In the end you'll spend roughly $600, so that's roughly twice the cost.
Why does that bother you? If Macs are better, which you seem to be saying, why shouldn't they cost more?
I got my employers to buy me a mac mini for evaluation purposes. The idea was to put the code developers on native Xwindows instead installing Xservers on Windows XP systems.
You can't do anything meaningful with a mac mini until you quadruple the memory, was what I found. Once you do that (and buy keyboard/mouse/monitor) the mac mini costs about twice what a comparable PC costs.
At the prices we're talking about, though, twice as much is not a big deal if you really want the Mac interface. Some people prefer it, so they will pay $300 extra for it...
A "solid development process" is no substitute for talent or skill.
I'll take code Alan Cox "lashed into an editor" over anything anyone ever wrote via a corporate process model.
The famous Sandia Z-machine is more of a quarter shrinker than a rail gun.
Sadly, the evolution of the English language nowadays seems to be directed by bad science fiction and gory video games. Real rail guns were projectile weapons so large they must be transported by rail - they can't be towed or moved with a truck without being disassembled because they are too heavy for roadbeds - and they have names like "Gustav", "Big Bertha" and "Schlanke Emma".
If the Z-machine was a gun (which it's not) it oughta be called a capacitive discharge cannon, not a rail gun. But I guess that's too hard to spell for kids today?
Those who ignore history are apparently in charge of revising the english language. Wikipedia and dictionary.com both use the "new" definition of railgun (although at least wiki has the grace to mention real railguns in passing).
Future historians are going to hate us for this one.
Can't you?
The way I use the English language, when I quote someone and then say this is completely wrong it means all parts of the quoted text are incorrect. If I meant the conclusion was wrong, or some individual premise was wrong, I'd use the word partly instead of completely. That is why your post confused me.
As for OSX performance, I suggest you look at some tables of actual measurements (such as these from IBM. In the real world, the numbers work out just like I said they would - although I admit I made my statements based on my own experience compiling the same code on a G4 and a Pentium PC running Red Hat linux, without any rigorous benchmarking.
I said, "OSX hacks a BSD kernel into a Mach microkernel, and thus performance is nearly as bad as Mach despite the existence of the mature, standardized interfaces of a BSD."
and you said "This is completely wrong."
So, you claim that OSX is NOT comprised of a BSD kernel hacked into a Mach microkernel? And that the performance is worse than Mach? Or maybe that performance of the hybrid kernel is better than a monolith?
Or is there some new meaning of the word "completely" that I haven't heard yet?
I don't get it.
I don't think we have any disagreement... although, to me, OSX "feels" slow, probably because I do 99% of my work in a text window under X11.
For example, the GUI is use has little or no effect on compiling OpenLDAP against SASL and Kerberos and loading a huge directory into the resultant software. It's pretty much kernel and hardware.
Y'know, if all you do is watch porn and download bootleg music files in your mom's basement, I'm sure the mac kernel seems fast to you.
Personally, I don't know any people using MySQL who aren't both creative and professional. But maybe I just don't get out enough....
That comparison is easy. OSX hacks a BSD kernel into a Mach microkernel, and thus performance is nearly as bad as Mach despite the existence of the mature, standardized interfaces of a BSD.
MacOSX is not about performance. It's about interface. I don't think Apple (or Next for that matter) has ever tried to deny their intention to overcome the performance problems caused by tremendously complex software through the use of immensely powerful hardware.
False. The interface of netcat is appropriate to its function, and nobody who hasn't spent years learning the intricacies of network protocols at the packet level can possibly use it. You can't use sing if you don't understand how ICMP rides herd on IP, and once you've reached that level of understanding the CLI interface is intuitive and a GUI simply restricts your creative abilities.
Testify, brother! I couldn't agree with you more.
I can only think of one thing you can't do more efficiently with a CLI (draw pictures) but then again I've always preferred CLIs (because they are so much faster and less restrictive) so I'm probably not the right person to ask.
Anyway, the existence of even one thing that the GUI does "better" still proves the point; that GUIs aren't useless.
Incidentally, my prior post was supposed have a link to Eben Moglen's interview here where he says "What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user." but I mis-moused it somehow.
I'd say that the GUI isn't "something better" than the CLI (see ) but rather "something that sucks in completely different ways than a CLI sucks".
So, he was a PC bigot, now he's a Mac bigot?
Seems like there's one word in common there....
I have experience with Exchange and Sendmail, and some familiarity with a number of other systems including postfix and PMDF.
I do not find any basis for your claim in my experience; AFAIK, for "giving access to mailboxes to those who need it" Exchange is pretty much equivalent to everything else out there.
Can you explain to me how you came to the conclusion that Exhange is "the best thing for this", as you put it?
In theory, yes, you are right. You should be able to just configure your client to reject connection when the host keys are changed, and provide the keys to clients via a secure channel like floppy, USB, or whatever (I recommend putting the SSH host public keys and wireless encryption keys on a CD, even though it's a huge waste of space. Some of my cow-orkers use a USB stick for this).
In practice, there are always rumors of SSH M-i-t-Ms going around, and some of the rumors always turn out to be true, although they are usually restricted to specific implementions or to specific encryption methods. For example, I use PuTTY to connect from windows boxen; in versions of PuTTY prior to 0.56 a M-i-t-M can simply replace your host key files during session startup, before host key verification is even begun. But if your AP OS is sufficiently esoteric or space-limited, an attacker will not be able to insert code to do this without breaking the wireless functions.
So, using dumb APs is another layer in the "defense in depth" strategy. You should have a virus scanner too...
When my son started kindergarten (the first public-funded educational level in the USA) I went to a "Parent's Open House" meeting with all the other drones.
Just for my own amusement, I counted the number of times each speaker (the high school principal, various members of the administrative and teaching staff) mentioned God or faith, and compared it to the number of times they mentioned learning or education.
Afterwards I had to take a shower. I honestly don't think anyone else noticed - except possibly a Hindu gentleman, who was clearly as uncomfortable as I was.
It's gotten noticeably worse since the WTC atrocity; there are "God Bless America" stickers all over the damned place. And every school in the district still says "under God" in the pledge of allegiance every morning, and the atheist kids who won't say the pledge still get beaten up by their peers just like they did when I was a child.
You can call me a fanboy, but I say
OK, you're a fanboy.
Fanboy.
128-bit WEP, no SSID broadcast (aka "stealth mode") and connect the access point via a crossover cable to an ethernet card on a stripped-down linux box that firewalls all ports except 22.
On the laptops use a little script that does an SSH login (user supplies password, never stored anywhere) and then forwards the SMB/CIFS, IMAPS, DNS, and SMTP-AUTH ports over the SSH connection.
Make sure the access point is very "dumb" - that is, it doesn't have enough memory or OS to allow an attacker who compromises the AP itself to install an SSH M-i-t-M sploit. I use weird Intel and Enterasys boxes (pulled out of dumpsters) that haven't got real OSes anyway.
If I've ever been cracked, it was done so gracefully I haven't even noticed... and since my neighbors don't even run WEP it's unlikely that I'd even be noticed much less targeted.
Oh, and most importantly: Don't use default passwords, and KEEP YOUR PATCHLEVELS UP TO DATE!
Seriously, man, grow a spine. Your organization - which is apparently funded by my tax dollars - needs to be reported to los federales. Your management's behaviour is criminal if your post is correct - so do your job, and your duty as a citizen, and turn the bastards in. Look up "anonymous whistle blower" in the federal phone book or consult Google for how to do it.