OK, I went to install Google Chrome, and the "download and install" button started running an external application without any prompts. Needless to say I immediately cancelled it and started digging through the source to see what the fox is going on.
function installApp() {
if (isOneClickEnabled() && _GU_isOneClickAvailable()) {
installViaOneClick();
} else if (isClickOnceEnabled() && _GU_isClickOnceAvailable()) {
installViaClickOnce();
} else {
installViaDownload();
} }
I am sure that some Google software that I installed in the past has given google this capability, rather than this being some kind of trust relationship between Mozilla and Google. I'm even sure that at some point I clicked "OK" to some question that said it was OK for them to do X, Y, and Z, and that included this capability.
Regardless...
I don't think this kind of backdoor is even vaguely sane, no matter how "non evil" Google may be. If this capability exists, then the possibility exists for other folks who aren't so "non evil".
This is something I'd expect from Microsoft.
And if they could slip something like that past a fellow as paranoid as me, they sure didn't provide nearly enough disclosure.
So...
What's going on. Is this something in Google Gears? In some other Google tool? I guess I'll have to start dissecting my browser and figure out exactly what the hell they're doing.
I see. That means that if a service is withdrawn without notice the corresponding source for the service as of that point may not be available anywhere. This should not normally be a big deal, but if you're dependent on a service operating under this license I would recommend taking advantage of this and mirroring their source, rather than depending on the fact that the source is out there.
I'm not sure how repeating my own point... the address bar (actually, only part of it) is associated with (but NOT part of) the page... is supposed to prove it wrong.
The address bar does not change. One widget in the address bar changes, the rest remain the same.
As someone else noted, if you maximize all the windows in an MDI interface it is functionally similar to a tabbed interface. That is how Opera's tabbed interface works: Opera was originally MDI and is emulating tabs as maximized MDI subwindows. It behaves ALMOST like a regular tabbed interface, except that the tabs are unnecessarily separated from the document by the address bar. I find this annoying, and it's why I no longer use Opera.
Tabs are a multiple document interface, but they are not Microsoft's MDI. My objection is to the window-in-a-window behavior of Microsoft's MDI, which unnecessarily duplicates objects associated with the page, sucking static elements unnecessarily into a dynamic object.
The tab is associated with the page. That association is not obviously iterative, that is, it is not associated with everything associated with the page. The content of the address bar does not change with the page, only one of the many widgets in the address bar is changed when the page is changed.
It's not just cosmetic. It's creating an association, it's drawing local content into a part of the interface that should only contain remote content.
most of this looks good, but damn there's bad in there as well.
Tabs above the address bar... no. Been there with Opera and I hate it, it's going back to MDI. Autocomplete inline... no. Not because it "flickers", because it doesn't flicker in Safari, but because of all the times I've typed in a URL that happened to be a shorter version of some URL I had previously typed. And yes, I *do* want it to autocomplete URLs I've pasted in. I don't want to have a web app opening without the browser location bar... ever. That puts the web app in control, not me, and is a great tool for phishers. Yes, they have their central phisher database, but it's better to avoid the problem in the first place.
So how open is it? Will they be willing at allow these things to be made optional, accept patches to let people change the way Google Chrome works?
And not one of those offered any evidence OS X is not based on FreeBSD.
Hold it right there, kid. You're changing whole story there. I said "OS X is not FreeBSD". That's a WHOLE different thing than saying "OS X is not based on FreeBSD". If you're going to put words into my mouth and try and argue against something I never said, I gotta figure you're trolling me.
But just in case you're serious, I'll explain some more.
In the beginning, there was UNIX, First Edition. This was released in the early '70s, and was significantly different from the UNIX you see now. First Edition begat 2nd Edition, and by 1976 the 6th Edition of the UNIX Programmer's manual was released. Sixth Edition was also released outside AT&T as Version 6 UNIX. This was the first version of UNIX to be widely used outside AT&T. By 1979, the 7th Edition, also known as Version 7, was shipping.
When I was at Berkeley around '80, the transition from Version 6 to Version 7 was going on, and the Berkeley SOftware Distribution tapes, that became 2BSD and 4BSD, were starting to be released.
Up to this point UNIX was only available under an academic source code license, because of legal restrictions from an earlier monopoly trial. But round this time this ran out and they were able to release UNIX commercially. Their first commercial UNIX was PWB, the Programmer's Work Bench, based on Version 6. They brought it up to date with Version 7, but in a way that was somewhat incompatible with Version 7, and called it System III.
Microsoft's version of UNIX, Xenix, was first based on Version 7 and then later on System III. They were originally planning to make MS-DOS Xenix-compatible, and a lot of the differences between MS-DOS 1.0 and MS-DOS 2.0 were based on Xenix. I was quite impressed with Xenix, it was one of the most stable commercial UNIX implementations in the early '80s.
Then Bill Gates fell in love with the Macintosh, and decided that Microsoft had to have their own macintosh, and dumped Xenix on a Microsoft spinoff called the Santa Cruz Operation, or SCO. SCO developed new versions of Xenix based on System III and System V, and later dropped the Xenix name from their product line completely.
Meanwhile, a whole new approach to OS design, based on the way real-time operating systems like RSX-11 and QNX worked, was being advanced. These were called Microkernels, and the idea was the the kernel itself could be implemented as multiple processes with a tiny "microkernel" underneath, using messages to coordinate them. Real time microkernels were REALLY small... the QNX microkernel was only a few K, small enough to fit entirely in the instruction cache on the 486.
Mach is not exactly a microkernel. The Mach kernel - without any services - was comparable in size to complete operating systems of its time. But it was free... under a license from Carnegie Mellon University... and was useful for microkernel research, but it was clearly too big and slow for real work. A typical Mach system used the 4BSD kernel as a single huge service that did most of the heavy lifting, but communicated with Mach services and applications using the Mach kernel. It was rather like building a motorcycle by sticking an automobile engine in a sidecar.
A couple of commercial operating systems were based on this. NeXTstep and Digital UNIX. NeXTstep was developed right at the end of the '80s, well before FreeBSD, and used the Mach kernel with an AT&T licensed (under the System V license) version of 4BSD as the "single server". The display system was based on Adobe's Display Postscript.
All these commercial licenses made NeXTstep very expensive. There is no way it could have been sold to the consumer market with several hundred dollars worth of license fees to AT&T and Adobe on every box.
OS X is a port of NeXTstep, using FreeBSD instead of the original 4.3BSD for the UNIX server component, because FreeBSD was the best free UNIX kernel they could find to replace the commercially licensed one they had b
It's interesting that Ivan showed a rightwards bias in the predictions. I've noticed a small but consistent leftward bias in the predictions since 2004 for most of the hurricanes that ended up hitting the east Texas or Louisiana coast, including Rita and tropical storm Eduoard... as well as Gustav.
This is of course totally non-scientific, based only on the hurricanes that made the news in Houston, but perhaps they're overcompensating for Ivan?
First of all I would encourage you to read a few messages other than the one you responded to. It should be obvious that I prefer OS X to FreeBSD+X11 as a desktop, for any number of reasons, but that doesn't mean that I have to prefer Darwin to FreeBSD... I think you're making a category error somewhere.
Anyway, on to the meat...
Darwin is not FreeBSD any more than FreeBSD is Version 7. In fact the design of FreeBSD has more in common with Version 7 than the design of OS X does with FreeBSD. Apple used FreeBSD the way Tru64 used 4.3-Reno and the way Lites uses 4.4-Lite, as the primary service provider in a Mach-based kernel. I wouldn't call that "being FreeBSD", any more than I would describe a truck that used a Ford V8 engine as being a Mustang.
First you say OS X doesn't include all the things FreeBDS does then you say FreeBSD is smaller.
That's right. Apart from a variety of things things Darwin includes that FreeBSD doesn't (such as its support for multiple CPU architectures in a single executable, and its kernel extension framework), the fundamental design of any Mach-based system is less efficient than a traditional UNIX kernel.
I'm not discussing the difference between the GUI frameworks built on top of FreeBSD and Darwin (again, I've already pointed out that I consider the additional cost of a Mac worthwhile to me, because of what you can do with OS X over and above any free UNIX). I'm simply addressing the design of the kernel. Mach was an interesting experiement, and I have used other Mach-based systems in the past, but it was not in the end a good design... it has few of the advantages of a real microkernel like QNX, but brings along with it most of the disadvantages attributed to microkernels, and on top of that its interprocess communication is inordinately expensive. Mach shoulders a good portion of the blame for the common impression that microkernels are slow and bloated.
OS X, thankfully, has largely abandoned Mach messages, but it still suffers from a lot of the Mach legacy.
If Apple had abandoned Mach and built OS X on FreeBSD directly (which they could have done... most of the innovations in NeXTstep that would have to be carried over originated with NeXT, not Carnegie Mellon) it would have been smaller and faster. This might not have made a huge effect on the desktop... there's a good deal of overhead in Aqua that would be there no matter what OS was underneath... but it would have made a huge difference to the success of OS X server.
It doesn't matter, if this wasn't checked by default all corporate rollouts of IE would check it anyway, because companies don't care if their intranets are compliant or not. If an employee calls up the help desk and says "hey, I can't fill out my timecard in Firefox" the help desk will just say "use internet explorer", and what's the employee going to do, boycott it?
So long as *external* sites aren't in compatibility mode by default, that's enough, because that's a default that's got a chance of sticking.
That there are "unbloated" linux distros doesn't change the point that the popular Linux distros are pretty damn bloated.
So, given that a lot of users seem to like certain kinds of bloat... I think a better name than "bloatware" needs to be applied to the crippled shareware that the original article was about. We used to call this stuff "crippleware". Why not keep using it?
"If everyone does it", but everyone isn't going to do it.
80% of "everyone" are using Internet Explorer, not Firefox.
Of the remaining 20%, the majority don't use ANY firefox extensions at all. I know people who picked Camino over Firefox on the Mac purely because they wanted flashblock built in.
It's like spam. If everyone filtered spam and nobody responded to it, we wouldn't have a spam problem, but that just doesn't happen, so the only way to fight spam is to actually go out and work to get spammers shut down... not just play filtering games on the 90%-and-increasing fraction of mail traffic that's spam.
It's not pop-up blockers that killed X10, it was people going out and getting folks selling ad space to X10 to quit doing it, by hitting THEM in THEIR pocketbooks. And that's what has to be done with Vibrant.
I think I'd still go with the laptop running Vista - seems to have more features and power.
There was a wonderful Apple ad back in the '80s, pointing out that the real power of a computer is what you get from it... not what specs it has. The people who are saying that Macs are "worth the cost" are not (in most cases, there are always a few caught in the reality distortion field who think Apple hardware is actually cost-competitive) saying that they are the best specced machines you can get for your money, but that the software makes them worth that cost.
You have already posted enough flames about how awful OS X is compared to your Linux of choice. I could even agree with you on a strictly UNIX-to-UNIX basis... I would prefer FreeBSD to Darwin myself... but that is irrelevant, because that's not the software that I bought my Mac for, nor what most people bought theirs for. Nobody's saying it's worth more *for everyone*, it's just worth more for *the people who buy them*.
Fucking around with Wine and virtual machines and everything else that involves is NOT worth saving a few hundred bucks to the people who are buying Macs, either.
You don't need to act like people who are simply saying "we believe that this software is worth the premium price for us" are attacking YOUR choice of software. Nobody is backing you into a corner... you're nailing the corner up behind you for whatever reason you find it necessary.
Macs are affordable, but it is not cheaper in my opinion.
You said that the first time, and I agreed with you the first time, I don't know what you're trying to communicate here.
My initial post was really about the cost of hardware, nothing else.
Your initial post was in response to a post that did not appear to make the claim that you seemed to be refuting. As the original poster, I thought I might be able to clarify that point a bit more. Apparently not.
Were you simply "mission posting", or was there some misunderstanding as to the intent of the post?
OS X is not FreeBSD underneath. It is more like Tru64, or 4.4 Lites. The kernel is a fairly typical Mach-based 4BSD single-server implementation, which has considerably higher overhead than the FreeBSD monolithic kernel. It also does not support all the features of FreeBSD: the lack of standard UNIX SCSI tape support, the lack of Jails, and the more complex execution environment, are all things I have run into in the past. FreeBSD is smaller, faster, tighter, and more stable.
I am glad, speaking as someone who was part of the FreeBSD project for a decade, and one of the original 386BSD "patchkit" effort that led to the development of Net/Free/OpenBSD, that OS X has incorporated so much of the code that resulted from that work. I find OS X a much more comfortable environment than Linux... let alone Windows... but that doesn't mean it hasn't got its problems.
The only 'advantage' the Mac Mini has over this laptop is that it has a 1.83GHz processor, while this laptop has a 1.66GHz processor.
If you don't consider OS X an advantage, then don't get a Mac.
With Linux or FreeBSD you get a decent OS, but no commercial software.
With Vista you get lots of software, but it's running on an OS deliberately designed to cripple what you can do with it.
OS X doesn't get you as good an OS as FreeBSD, and it doesn't get you as much software as Vista, but it gets you a WAY better OS than Vista, and WAY more software than any free UNIX.
If THAT is not worth anything to you, then that's fine, but it's what makes them wort their price for the people who do buy them.
Macs are certainly affordable now, but you seriously cannot tell me Macs are cheaper.
"Not overpriced" doesn't mean "cheaper" any more than "more expensive" means "overpriced".
When I look back at the lightweight Windowmaker/GNUstep environment I prefer, I'd say that the Gnome/KDE gigabytes of junk on most Linux desktops counts as "bloatware".
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I went to install Google Chrome, and the "download and install" button started running an external application without any prompts. Needless to say I immediately cancelled it and started digging through the source to see what the fox is going on.
I am sure that some Google software that I installed in the past has given google this capability, rather than this being some kind of trust relationship between Mozilla and Google. I'm even sure that at some point I clicked "OK" to some question that said it was OK for them to do X, Y, and Z, and that included this capability.
Regardless...
I don't think this kind of backdoor is even vaguely sane, no matter how "non evil" Google may be. If this capability exists, then the possibility exists for other folks who aren't so "non evil".
This is something I'd expect from Microsoft.
And if they could slip something like that past a fellow as paranoid as me, they sure didn't provide nearly enough disclosure.
So...
What's going on. Is this something in Google Gears? In some other Google tool? I guess I'll have to start dissecting my browser and figure out exactly what the hell they're doing.
I see. That means that if a service is withdrawn without notice the corresponding source for the service as of that point may not be available anywhere. This should not normally be a big deal, but if you're dependent on a service operating under this license I would recommend taking advantage of this and mirroring their source, rather than depending on the fact that the source is out there.
That seems to incorporate the requirements of the GPL3 by reference.
No requirement that you keep the source available for X years, like the GPL?
Well, the GPL does if you don't include the source with the binaries.
I'm not sure how repeating my own point ... the address bar (actually, only part of it) is associated with (but NOT part of) the page ... is supposed to prove it wrong.
The address bar does not change. One widget in the address bar changes, the rest remain the same.
As someone else noted, if you maximize all the windows in an MDI interface it is functionally similar to a tabbed interface. That is how Opera's tabbed interface works: Opera was originally MDI and is emulating tabs as maximized MDI subwindows. It behaves ALMOST like a regular tabbed interface, except that the tabs are unnecessarily separated from the document by the address bar. I find this annoying, and it's why I no longer use Opera.
Tabbed browsing is MDI
Tabs are a multiple document interface, but they are not Microsoft's MDI. My objection is to the window-in-a-window behavior of Microsoft's MDI, which unnecessarily duplicates objects associated with the page, sucking static elements unnecessarily into a dynamic object.
The tab is associated with the page. That association is not obviously iterative, that is, it is not associated with everything associated with the page. The content of the address bar does not change with the page, only one of the many widgets in the address bar is changed when the page is changed.
It's not just cosmetic. It's creating an association, it's drawing local content into a part of the interface that should only contain remote content.
1. That's a clause of the GPL you're referring to, not an inherent attribute of open source licenses.
2. Regardless of the license involved, the creator of a program is not bound by it, hence the whole "dual licensed" arrangement for things like Qt.
most of this looks good, but damn there's bad in there as well.
Tabs above the address bar... no. Been there with Opera and I hate it, it's going back to MDI. Autocomplete inline... no. Not because it "flickers", because it doesn't flicker in Safari, but because of all the times I've typed in a URL that happened to be a shorter version of some URL I had previously typed. And yes, I *do* want it to autocomplete URLs I've pasted in. I don't want to have a web app opening without the browser location bar... ever. That puts the web app in control, not me, and is a great tool for phishers. Yes, they have their central phisher database, but it's better to avoid the problem in the first place.
So how open is it? Will they be willing at allow these things to be made optional, accept patches to let people change the way Google Chrome works?
That's what Opera does, and it drives me nuts. It's like going back to MDI.
If that's not optional, it's not even worth bothering looking at.
And not one of those offered any evidence OS X is not based on FreeBSD.
Hold it right there, kid. You're changing whole story there. I said "OS X is not FreeBSD". That's a WHOLE different thing than saying "OS X is not based on FreeBSD". If you're going to put words into my mouth and try and argue against something I never said, I gotta figure you're trolling me.
But just in case you're serious, I'll explain some more.
In the beginning, there was UNIX, First Edition. This was released in the early '70s, and was significantly different from the UNIX you see now. First Edition begat 2nd Edition, and by 1976 the 6th Edition of the UNIX Programmer's manual was released. Sixth Edition was also released outside AT&T as Version 6 UNIX. This was the first version of UNIX to be widely used outside AT&T. By 1979, the 7th Edition, also known as Version 7, was shipping.
When I was at Berkeley around '80, the transition from Version 6 to Version 7 was going on, and the Berkeley SOftware Distribution tapes, that became 2BSD and 4BSD, were starting to be released.
Up to this point UNIX was only available under an academic source code license, because of legal restrictions from an earlier monopoly trial. But round this time this ran out and they were able to release UNIX commercially. Their first commercial UNIX was PWB, the Programmer's Work Bench, based on Version 6. They brought it up to date with Version 7, but in a way that was somewhat incompatible with Version 7, and called it System III.
Microsoft's version of UNIX, Xenix, was first based on Version 7 and then later on System III. They were originally planning to make MS-DOS Xenix-compatible, and a lot of the differences between MS-DOS 1.0 and MS-DOS 2.0 were based on Xenix. I was quite impressed with Xenix, it was one of the most stable commercial UNIX implementations in the early '80s.
Then Bill Gates fell in love with the Macintosh, and decided that Microsoft had to have their own macintosh, and dumped Xenix on a Microsoft spinoff called the Santa Cruz Operation, or SCO. SCO developed new versions of Xenix based on System III and System V, and later dropped the Xenix name from their product line completely.
Meanwhile, a whole new approach to OS design, based on the way real-time operating systems like RSX-11 and QNX worked, was being advanced. These were called Microkernels, and the idea was the the kernel itself could be implemented as multiple processes with a tiny "microkernel" underneath, using messages to coordinate them. Real time microkernels were REALLY small... the QNX microkernel was only a few K, small enough to fit entirely in the instruction cache on the 486.
Mach is not exactly a microkernel. The Mach kernel - without any services - was comparable in size to complete operating systems of its time. But it was free... under a license from Carnegie Mellon University... and was useful for microkernel research, but it was clearly too big and slow for real work. A typical Mach system used the 4BSD kernel as a single huge service that did most of the heavy lifting, but communicated with Mach services and applications using the Mach kernel. It was rather like building a motorcycle by sticking an automobile engine in a sidecar.
A couple of commercial operating systems were based on this. NeXTstep and Digital UNIX. NeXTstep was developed right at the end of the '80s, well before FreeBSD, and used the Mach kernel with an AT&T licensed (under the System V license) version of 4BSD as the "single server". The display system was based on Adobe's Display Postscript.
All these commercial licenses made NeXTstep very expensive. There is no way it could have been sold to the consumer market with several hundred dollars worth of license fees to AT&T and Adobe on every box.
OS X is a port of NeXTstep, using FreeBSD instead of the original 4.3BSD for the UNIX server component, because FreeBSD was the best free UNIX kernel they could find to replace the commercially licensed one they had b
It's interesting that Ivan showed a rightwards bias in the predictions. I've noticed a small but consistent leftward bias in the predictions since 2004 for most of the hurricanes that ended up hitting the east Texas or Louisiana coast, including Rita and tropical storm Eduoard... as well as Gustav.
This is of course totally non-scientific, based only on the hurricanes that made the news in Houston, but perhaps they're overcompensating for Ivan?
First of all I would encourage you to read a few messages other than the one you responded to. It should be obvious that I prefer OS X to FreeBSD+X11 as a desktop, for any number of reasons, but that doesn't mean that I have to prefer Darwin to FreeBSD... I think you're making a category error somewhere.
Anyway, on to the meat...
Darwin is not FreeBSD any more than FreeBSD is Version 7. In fact the design of FreeBSD has more in common with Version 7 than the design of OS X does with FreeBSD. Apple used FreeBSD the way Tru64 used 4.3-Reno and the way Lites uses 4.4-Lite, as the primary service provider in a Mach-based kernel. I wouldn't call that "being FreeBSD", any more than I would describe a truck that used a Ford V8 engine as being a Mustang.
First you say OS X doesn't include all the things FreeBDS does then you say FreeBSD is smaller.
That's right. Apart from a variety of things things Darwin includes that FreeBSD doesn't (such as its support for multiple CPU architectures in a single executable, and its kernel extension framework), the fundamental design of any Mach-based system is less efficient than a traditional UNIX kernel.
I'm not discussing the difference between the GUI frameworks built on top of FreeBSD and Darwin (again, I've already pointed out that I consider the additional cost of a Mac worthwhile to me, because of what you can do with OS X over and above any free UNIX). I'm simply addressing the design of the kernel. Mach was an interesting experiement, and I have used other Mach-based systems in the past, but it was not in the end a good design... it has few of the advantages of a real microkernel like QNX, but brings along with it most of the disadvantages attributed to microkernels, and on top of that its interprocess communication is inordinately expensive. Mach shoulders a good portion of the blame for the common impression that microkernels are slow and bloated.
OS X, thankfully, has largely abandoned Mach messages, but it still suffers from a lot of the Mach legacy.
If Apple had abandoned Mach and built OS X on FreeBSD directly (which they could have done... most of the innovations in NeXTstep that would have to be carried over originated with NeXT, not Carnegie Mellon) it would have been smaller and faster. This might not have made a huge effect on the desktop... there's a good deal of overhead in Aqua that would be there no matter what OS was underneath... but it would have made a huge difference to the success of OS X server.
It doesn't matter, if this wasn't checked by default all corporate rollouts of IE would check it anyway, because companies don't care if their intranets are compliant or not. If an employee calls up the help desk and says "hey, I can't fill out my timecard in Firefox" the help desk will just say "use internet explorer", and what's the employee going to do, boycott it?
So long as *external* sites aren't in compatibility mode by default, that's enough, because that's a default that's got a chance of sticking.
That there are "unbloated" linux distros doesn't change the point that the popular Linux distros are pretty damn bloated.
So, given that a lot of users seem to like certain kinds of bloat... I think a better name than "bloatware" needs to be applied to the crippled shareware that the original article was about. We used to call this stuff "crippleware". Why not keep using it?
"If everyone does it", but everyone isn't going to do it.
80% of "everyone" are using Internet Explorer, not Firefox.
Of the remaining 20%, the majority don't use ANY firefox extensions at all. I know people who picked Camino over Firefox on the Mac purely because they wanted flashblock built in.
It's like spam. If everyone filtered spam and nobody responded to it, we wouldn't have a spam problem, but that just doesn't happen, so the only way to fight spam is to actually go out and work to get spammers shut down... not just play filtering games on the 90%-and-increasing fraction of mail traffic that's spam.
It's not pop-up blockers that killed X10, it was people going out and getting folks selling ad space to X10 to quit doing it, by hitting THEM in THEIR pocketbooks. And that's what has to be done with Vibrant.
I think I'd still go with the laptop running Vista - seems to have more features and power.
There was a wonderful Apple ad back in the '80s, pointing out that the real power of a computer is what you get from it... not what specs it has. The people who are saying that Macs are "worth the cost" are not (in most cases, there are always a few caught in the reality distortion field who think Apple hardware is actually cost-competitive) saying that they are the best specced machines you can get for your money, but that the software makes them worth that cost.
You have already posted enough flames about how awful OS X is compared to your Linux of choice. I could even agree with you on a strictly UNIX-to-UNIX basis... I would prefer FreeBSD to Darwin myself... but that is irrelevant, because that's not the software that I bought my Mac for, nor what most people bought theirs for. Nobody's saying it's worth more *for everyone*, it's just worth more for *the people who buy them*.
Fucking around with Wine and virtual machines and everything else that involves is NOT worth saving a few hundred bucks to the people who are buying Macs, either.
You don't need to act like people who are simply saying "we believe that this software is worth the premium price for us" are attacking YOUR choice of software. Nobody is backing you into a corner... you're nailing the corner up behind you for whatever reason you find it necessary.
Macs are affordable, but it is not cheaper in my opinion.
You said that the first time, and I agreed with you the first time, I don't know what you're trying to communicate here.
My initial post was really about the cost of hardware, nothing else.
Your initial post was in response to a post that did not appear to make the claim that you seemed to be refuting. As the original poster, I thought I might be able to clarify that point a bit more. Apparently not.
Were you simply "mission posting", or was there some misunderstanding as to the intent of the post?
OS X is not FreeBSD underneath. It is more like Tru64, or 4.4 Lites. The kernel is a fairly typical Mach-based 4BSD single-server implementation, which has considerably higher overhead than the FreeBSD monolithic kernel. It also does not support all the features of FreeBSD: the lack of standard UNIX SCSI tape support, the lack of Jails, and the more complex execution environment, are all things I have run into in the past. FreeBSD is smaller, faster, tighter, and more stable.
I am glad, speaking as someone who was part of the FreeBSD project for a decade, and one of the original 386BSD "patchkit" effort that led to the development of Net/Free/OpenBSD, that OS X has incorporated so much of the code that resulted from that work. I find OS X a much more comfortable environment than Linux... let alone Windows... but that doesn't mean it hasn't got its problems.
I know you're just being a stupid twat, but you don't have to be an illiterate stupid twat.
The double negative is in "not unreasonable".
Eliminating that gets you "We're reasonable here, nobody's going to eat your eyes".
BTW, YFTSTR.
HTH, HAND.
Enough people acting, and they'll go the way of X10.
just solving the problem for yourself won't make it happen, though.
The only 'advantage' the Mac Mini has over this laptop is that it has a 1.83GHz processor, while this laptop has a 1.66GHz processor.
If you don't consider OS X an advantage, then don't get a Mac.
With Linux or FreeBSD you get a decent OS, but no commercial software.
With Vista you get lots of software, but it's running on an OS deliberately designed to cripple what you can do with it.
OS X doesn't get you as good an OS as FreeBSD, and it doesn't get you as much software as Vista, but it gets you a WAY better OS than Vista, and WAY more software than any free UNIX.
If THAT is not worth anything to you, then that's fine, but it's what makes them wort their price for the people who do buy them.
Macs are certainly affordable now, but you seriously cannot tell me Macs are cheaper.
"Not overpriced" doesn't mean "cheaper" any more than "more expensive" means "overpriced".
We're not unreasonable here, nobody's going to eat your eyes.
When I look back at the lightweight Windowmaker/GNUstep environment I prefer, I'd say that the Gnome/KDE gigabytes of junk on most Linux desktops counts as "bloatware".