I agree. While OSX was in development, Apple would publish documentation on ADC about their progress. The developers ran into many problems due to the huge differences between UNIX and the old MacOS. Some of the problems were related to HFS volumes, application resource forks and the concept of moving files anywhere and not having the application break. These are things many Mac users take for granted and probably haven't even thought twice about under OSX. I wish Apple had archived those docs because they were a pretty good read.
But why can't they sell OSX on x86? Isn't that hardware too???
You missed the point. Apple makes most of their money off of the machines that they sell. If Apple sells one high end G4 for $20,000 then they will make more than than they would selling 100 copies of OSX to x86 users.
x86 is cheaper faster, and easier to manage for apple and the customers
x86 is cheaper but does not include the math powers of the PPC and AltiVec. Quartz would probably choke on x86 unless it was a high speed Duron or something, and even then it would just be raw speed keeping the OS going. Look how slow it runs on PPC alone!
It would also be far harder to support the wide variety of hardware on the x86 platform, as compared to the Apple controlled hardware that they put out. When they ported Rhapsody to x86 (Blue Box), it supported a bare minimum of hardware for a reason. Apple only included what they wanted to support, avoiding the plague that has screwed up Windows for years.
Apple will port Darwin to the PC, but never Aqua. Apple has too much invested in PPC and AltiVec.
NewDeal is awesome. We were trying it at work on a bunch of 386's. Its got the Windows 95 sort of look and a great suite of apps including an lightweight www browser. It also requires less than 1MB of RAM! Perfect for old machine you want to be quick internet terminals.
Are there no graphics utilities "for the rest of us" under MacOS?
The problem is that on the Mac platform the GIMP is no different than the other 5 zillion graphics programs out there. Even AppleWorks has a pretty fair set of image editing tools, and its not even intended to be used in that manner.
Its great to have the GIMP on the Mac, but don't expect Mac users to be too enthused at what they've been seeing for years. The fact that its free might turn a few heads though.
I case you didn't know, Westwood makes Nox, an advanture game which competes directly against Diablo. The multiplayer in Nox is supposed to be way better than that of Diablo, but the single player game is apparrently not as great. I have even seen people wearing the Nox t-shirts!
C&C: Red Alert 2 was also a big seller this year, but I think Warcraft III will kill it in sales.
You are incorrect. The BASIC which you refer to is the version that was popular in the early eighties. The later versions were far more structured with local and remote functions and subs, libraries and includes. An example of BASIC code which you could run through BC.EXE (Microsoft's BASIC compiler) in probably about 1987 would be like this:
DECLARE SUB SomeSub()
DECLARE FUNCTION Multiply%(fnum%,snum%)
DIM SHARED SomeGlobal%
CALL SomeSub ()
SUB SomeSub()
DIM B%
B% = Multiply%(2, 2)
PRINT "The answer is " + STR$(B%)
END SUB
FUNCTION Multiply% (fnum%, snum%)
Multiply% = fnum% * snum%
END FUNCTION
The problem with the development world is that they are stuck on the fixation that the laguage hasn't evolved since BASIC in 1979. These are the same people who complained about using line numbers in QBASIC when they didn't need them at all (in fact the above code will probably work in QBASIC.EXE). Even C wasn't in its current state in a day!
This could never work. Windows 9x VxD's, NT SYS modules and MacOS extensions are all kernel modules. They load similarily to the Linux modules at boot time, but they are designed for their specific kernel and its driver model.
NT drivers need the HAL, MacOS drivers need the CFM (code fragment manager) as well as other kernel specific things. To get them to work under Linux you would probably have to change the entire driver model that Linux is using.
It is unfortunate, but it just could never happen. Device drivers are too low in the system structure, whereas browser plugins reside on top.
GEOS was great. It was a very clean GUI that needed very little memory to run, and it was a hell of an improvement over the C64 BASIC prompt. For those who are interested, GEOS has evolved into NewDeal.
That is FUD and you know it. IIS is not included as part of a Win2K install at all, it must be installed by the user off of the 2K CD. Once it is installed it is very similar to any other service, third party or Microsoft. It installs no kernel modules into the NT boot sequence, it just runs at high privs. If you were running Apache continually as root you would be subject to the same level of problems IIS has.
Its not a matter of kernel integration, it is simply a matter of privelleges.
You guys have to understand that if a Mac reviewer sees a pixel out of place...
That's so true! When the Mac switched from MFS to HFS thats how you would tell if the system was running HFS or not, by an extra pixel in the window by the close box!
it's the transparencies and other Aqua-isms that can't be accelerated with a typical 2D graphics card
If you've ever tried to create a transparent window with the Carbon SDK under OS9, then you'll understand why MacOSX requires a G3 or higher to run. It is slow as hell. The controls take up to a minute to update and there is no going back once you've clicked one. Even under the Carbon 1.2 SDK, which renders windows incredibly faster on a 2D card, the controls are still slow, and now are not displayed properly. I agree that OS/X is a great base and will probably lead the MacOS into the future, but right now it is just not an alternative.
The functionality that made the MacOS popular is somewhat lost. Old time Mac users expect some things and none are there under OSX. The "close box" is on the wrong side of the Window, icons etc. are not handled the same, and the Finder is not as intuative as OS9's at all. Simple things like popup folders, LaserWriter 8 and the Control Strip are gone. How can I install this printer? Well now I need a driver!
Then we get to to the difficult part, the new filesystem. Mac users are used to just moving things around, dropping them wherever, and being able to find these things again. I know people who still can't find things that the download because they are no long just dropped on the Desktop, they are dropped in a profile storage area. Prefs are no longer in Hard Disk:System Folder:Preferences they are installed in other places. I can also no longer drag a Finder and System file on a disk and get it to boot.
I appreciate UNIX, but on a server or networking installation. I cannot give OS/X to my mom/grandparents and expect them to run it. It is just to complex. They want things simple. They could care less about Protected Memory or Preemptive multitasking, as long as they can drag and drop things into Office and then print it to their HP bubblejet crap printer. Right now Windows 98 and a slew of Wizards are more preferable to them than UNIX.
I think Apple has abandoned their long term users in hope of improving their OS's image. I wish they had stuck with the client they had proposed years ago (looks like OS9, but Mach underneath, much like OS/X server), but they haven't, and now I know many hardcore Mac users that are doubting the Mac. People who would have died for Apple are now swearing against OS/X. Was it worth it for Apple? I hope so...
Apple has made a few efforts to get the MacOS on Intel machines. Rhapsody Blue Box comes to mind and Darwin x86 is in the works. The problem is not so much porting the OS, its in the vast amount of hardware on the x86 platform. If you look at Blue Box, it supported such a small amount of hardware, that most common PC's couldn't even use it (I couldn't install it until I had the proper Adaptec SCSI controller). With a Mac, Apple know exactly what hardware has been and will be in it, and they can develop around that. Until the x86 market gets more standardized hardware, I think it will be a long time before Apple considers moving the MacOS to x86 in a complete way.
Look at the way the developers of XFree have come under fire or not including legacy S3 support in XFree 4 (among other video cards). Apple just does not want to deal with it. It is far easier to do their own thing, and know that it will work well on it.
Hey! Come to think of it, I still have an Apple IIe in perfect working order in my storage room! And numerous Mac SE's too. Not one has given me trouble in all the years I've owned them. Yet all the 386+ machines that I've owned (except my current Pentium machine) have had some hardware failure at some point. Apple must do something right!
Re:More accurately, the reincarnaton of A/UX?
on
OS X
·
· Score: 1
Hey! Don't complain! You've never tried Minix on an old Mac. Now that was bad! A/UX was a godsend to the Mac compared to Minix.
I agree, if you read the documentation at Apple Devworld you'll find some technotes that say that the BSD layer is easy to remove from OSX, and it may not even be present in future versions of the MacOS. The BSD layer is from the FreeBSD code, but I think its just more of a convienent stepping stone for MacOS 11.
Actually, TCP/IP was available for Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) and Windows NT 3.51 as a seperate package which you would request from them (and later on download from their FTP). I think there was even TCP support for LANMAN (DOS networking) which came out even before the Windows packages. Either way, TCP/IP has been supported by Microsoft for a long time. Most people don't know about it though because they did not widely spread the news of its existence (most people with Windows did not need it at the time) and it lacked a PPP dialer (thus the popularity of Trumpet Winsock).
Since the late 80's and early nineties, phone companies have moved switching from the old card spitting stepper and crossbar systems to more computerized versions. Even with *69, you are still logged somewhere on the system. In the old days it worked because unless your phone companies system popped out a "trouble card" you would pretty much not be found. With newer databases, most companies can provide and exact record of EVERYTHING you have dialed from your phone, even if you dial only three numbers and hang up.
That story is full of BS. *69 is completely traceable and you are correct in what you say because ANI is done a "layer" below the CLID system which *69 works on. He would get caught so easily, especially dialing any number outside of his areacode which can often cause some friction between CLID interfaces at different switching stations, and the block may become changed or not even work at all!
I don't know what the big deal is here. This has happened to many other browsers before, including older versions of IE. With new standards, scripting and virtual machine technologies being implemented in browsers continually, it is expected. It is a simple browser vulnerability, and that is all.
This is not new, if you read Bugtraq, or even Georgi Guninski's page, you will see this and many other exploits are a common occurance in many browsers. Even browsers that handle only plain html like Lynx have been proven vulnerable at times.
Since IE3, many vulnerabilities like this have popped up in MS's browser. IE3 was far worse, as both the Windows and Macintosh platform could both be explotited in terrible ways. Also, we can't forget the famous Netscape Brown Orifice exploit, which Netscape admittedly couldn't even fix in their 4.x series of browsers. I'm sure there are some fine exploits waiting to be found in the lesser used browsers too, but they are just far less reviewed by the security community.
Now I don't think its right that such vulnerabilities exist, but bugs will always be present in software. Internet Explorer just happens to use a lot of mixed technologies and therefore there are more ways for it to be exploited. This is nothing more than someone exploiting a vulnerable version of BIND or RPC. The only difference I find here is that Microsoft is involved, and thus makes a good sensationalist Slashdot target.
As far as I know, Apple's products have always been standards compliant and there has always been a good variety of Mac software available for any task. The point of buying the MacOS is mostly for the interface, if you don't want it then install BE, Linux or some other variant.
Why have the trouble to remove Aqua from Darwin
If you just want darwin, you can download it without Aqua. If you have bought OSX, then you will probably not want to remove Aqua anyway.
can you trust a company that can not adopt to better solutions (multiple buttons for example
There are multiple button mice available for Macs. The Macintosh concept is simplicity, and there is no need under the MacOS for two button mice. Everything is designed around one, and it works. PC users constantly complain about the missing button only because they never truly bother to learn how the OS works.
why should I trash my diskette when I only wants to eject it?
There are many ways to eject a disk. If you are too lazy to look under your special menu then that is your loss. Also try pressing COMMAND-E sometime (E=EJECT!)...
I think it's cool that there is more support, but supporting the Geforce 3 before it's out?
Yeah, I've heard that zsh in 3D mode has a great framerate. The accelerated ANSI color rendering is also supposed to be pretty good, though not as fast as in bash or csh...
You're making the incorrect assumption that Microsoft has opened up its source code so that people can trust it.
No, the Bell Labs paper which he linked to (Reflections on Trusting Trust) describes how a compiler can be compromised, thus making examination of source code useless. The point is that they can probe the Windows source all they want, but VisualC could insert the backdoor at compile time. Since they do not have the VC source, they would never know otherwise.
Wow...thats amazing. You were right, my Bible is the New Testament not the Holy Bible like my parents have. Many passages like the ones above are not present...very interesting...
Slashdot Mirror
The secret is in the order you use. If you hit abort and then fail right after, DOS will give up and give you a prompt back.
I agree. While OSX was in development, Apple would publish documentation on ADC about their progress. The developers ran into many problems due to the huge differences between UNIX and the old MacOS. Some of the problems were related to HFS volumes, application resource forks and the concept of moving files anywhere and not having the application break. These are things many Mac users take for granted and probably haven't even thought twice about under OSX. I wish Apple had archived those docs because they were a pretty good read.
But why can't they sell OSX on x86? Isn't that hardware too???
You missed the point. Apple makes most of their money off of the machines that they sell. If Apple sells one high end G4 for $20,000 then they will make more than than they would selling 100 copies of OSX to x86 users.
x86 is cheaper faster, and easier to manage for apple and the customers
x86 is cheaper but does not include the math powers of the PPC and AltiVec. Quartz would probably choke on x86 unless it was a high speed Duron or something, and even then it would just be raw speed keeping the OS going. Look how slow it runs on PPC alone!
It would also be far harder to support the wide variety of hardware on the x86 platform, as compared to the Apple controlled hardware that they put out. When they ported Rhapsody to x86 (Blue Box), it supported a bare minimum of hardware for a reason. Apple only included what they wanted to support, avoiding the plague that has screwed up Windows for years.
Apple will port Darwin to the PC, but never Aqua. Apple has too much invested in PPC and AltiVec.
NewDeal is awesome. We were trying it at work on a bunch of 386's. Its got the Windows 95 sort of look and a great suite of apps including an lightweight www browser. It also requires less than 1MB of RAM! Perfect for old machine you want to be quick internet terminals.
Are there no graphics utilities "for the rest of us" under MacOS?
The problem is that on the Mac platform the GIMP is no different than the other 5 zillion graphics programs out there. Even AppleWorks has a pretty fair set of image editing tools, and its not even intended to be used in that manner.
Its great to have the GIMP on the Mac, but don't expect Mac users to be too enthused at what they've been seeing for years. The fact that its free might turn a few heads though.
Its something like "Mozilla 4.0 Compatible (IE 5.5)" or something close to that.
I case you didn't know, Westwood makes Nox, an advanture game which competes directly against Diablo. The multiplayer in Nox is supposed to be way better than that of Diablo, but the single player game is apparrently not as great. I have even seen people wearing the Nox t-shirts!
C&C: Red Alert 2 was also a big seller this year, but I think Warcraft III will kill it in sales.
You are incorrect. The BASIC which you refer to is the version that was popular in the early eighties. The later versions were far more structured with local and remote functions and subs, libraries and includes. An example of BASIC code which you could run through BC.EXE (Microsoft's BASIC compiler) in probably about 1987 would be like this:
The problem with the development world is that they are stuck on the fixation that the laguage hasn't evolved since BASIC in 1979. These are the same people who complained about using line numbers in QBASIC when they didn't need them at all (in fact the above code will probably work in QBASIC.EXE). Even C wasn't in its current state in a day!
This could never work. Windows 9x VxD's, NT SYS modules and MacOS extensions are all kernel modules. They load similarily to the Linux modules at boot time, but they are designed for their specific kernel and its driver model.
NT drivers need the HAL, MacOS drivers need the CFM (code fragment manager) as well as other kernel specific things. To get them to work under Linux you would probably have to change the entire driver model that Linux is using.
It is unfortunate, but it just could never happen. Device drivers are too low in the system structure, whereas browser plugins reside on top.
GEOS was great. It was a very clean GUI that needed very little memory to run, and it was a hell of an improvement over the C64 BASIC prompt. For those who are interested, GEOS has evolved into NewDeal.
That is FUD and you know it. IIS is not included as part of a Win2K install at all, it must be installed by the user off of the 2K CD. Once it is installed it is very similar to any other service, third party or Microsoft. It installs no kernel modules into the NT boot sequence, it just runs at high privs. If you were running Apache continually as root you would be subject to the same level of problems IIS has.
Its not a matter of kernel integration, it is simply a matter of privelleges.
Thats a good feature of good ol' Windows NT. When the hard disk is done, the server core dumps. Lets you know exactly when your drives fail.
You guys have to understand that if a Mac reviewer sees a pixel out of place...
That's so true! When the Mac switched from MFS to HFS thats how you would tell if the system was running HFS or not, by an extra pixel in the window by the close box!
it's the transparencies and other Aqua-isms that can't be accelerated with a typical 2D graphics card
If you've ever tried to create a transparent window with the Carbon SDK under OS9, then you'll understand why MacOSX requires a G3 or higher to run. It is slow as hell. The controls take up to a minute to update and there is no going back once you've clicked one. Even under the Carbon 1.2 SDK, which renders windows incredibly faster on a 2D card, the controls are still slow, and now are not displayed properly. I agree that OS/X is a great base and will probably lead the MacOS into the future, but right now it is just not an alternative.
The functionality that made the MacOS popular is somewhat lost. Old time Mac users expect some things and none are there under OSX. The "close box" is on the wrong side of the Window, icons etc. are not handled the same, and the Finder is not as intuative as OS9's at all. Simple things like popup folders, LaserWriter 8 and the Control Strip are gone. How can I install this printer? Well now I need a driver!
Then we get to to the difficult part, the new filesystem. Mac users are used to just moving things around, dropping them wherever, and being able to find these things again. I know people who still can't find things that the download because they are no long just dropped on the Desktop, they are dropped in a profile storage area. Prefs are no longer in Hard Disk:System Folder:Preferences they are installed in other places. I can also no longer drag a Finder and System file on a disk and get it to boot.
I appreciate UNIX, but on a server or networking installation. I cannot give OS/X to my mom/grandparents and expect them to run it. It is just to complex. They want things simple. They could care less about Protected Memory or Preemptive multitasking, as long as they can drag and drop things into Office and then print it to their HP bubblejet crap printer. Right now Windows 98 and a slew of Wizards are more preferable to them than UNIX.
I think Apple has abandoned their long term users in hope of improving their OS's image. I wish they had stuck with the client they had proposed years ago (looks like OS9, but Mach underneath, much like OS/X server), but they haven't, and now I know many hardcore Mac users that are doubting the Mac. People who would have died for Apple are now swearing against OS/X. Was it worth it for Apple? I hope so...
Apple has made a few efforts to get the MacOS on Intel machines. Rhapsody Blue Box comes to mind and Darwin x86 is in the works. The problem is not so much porting the OS, its in the vast amount of hardware on the x86 platform. If you look at Blue Box, it supported such a small amount of hardware, that most common PC's couldn't even use it (I couldn't install it until I had the proper Adaptec SCSI controller). With a Mac, Apple know exactly what hardware has been and will be in it, and they can develop around that. Until the x86 market gets more standardized hardware, I think it will be a long time before Apple considers moving the MacOS to x86 in a complete way.
Look at the way the developers of XFree have come under fire or not including legacy S3 support in XFree 4 (among other video cards). Apple just does not want to deal with it. It is far easier to do their own thing, and know that it will work well on it.
Hey! Come to think of it, I still have an Apple IIe in perfect working order in my storage room! And numerous Mac SE's too. Not one has given me trouble in all the years I've owned them. Yet all the 386+ machines that I've owned (except my current Pentium machine) have had some hardware failure at some point. Apple must do something right!
Hey! Don't complain! You've never tried Minix on an old Mac. Now that was bad! A/UX was a godsend to the Mac compared to Minix.
I agree, if you read the documentation at Apple Devworld you'll find some technotes that say that the BSD layer is easy to remove from OSX, and it may not even be present in future versions of the MacOS. The BSD layer is from the FreeBSD code, but I think its just more of a convienent stepping stone for MacOS 11.
Actually, TCP/IP was available for Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) and Windows NT 3.51 as a seperate package which you would request from them (and later on download from their FTP). I think there was even TCP support for LANMAN (DOS networking) which came out even before the Windows packages. Either way, TCP/IP has been supported by Microsoft for a long time. Most people don't know about it though because they did not widely spread the news of its existence (most people with Windows did not need it at the time) and it lacked a PPP dialer (thus the popularity of Trumpet Winsock).
Since the late 80's and early nineties, phone companies have moved switching from the old card spitting stepper and crossbar systems to more computerized versions. Even with *69, you are still logged somewhere on the system. In the old days it worked because unless your phone companies system popped out a "trouble card" you would pretty much not be found. With newer databases, most companies can provide and exact record of EVERYTHING you have dialed from your phone, even if you dial only three numbers and hang up.
That story is full of BS. *69 is completely traceable and you are correct in what you say because ANI is done a "layer" below the CLID system which *69 works on. He would get caught so easily, especially dialing any number outside of his areacode which can often cause some friction between CLID interfaces at different switching stations, and the block may become changed or not even work at all!
I don't know what the big deal is here. This has happened to many other browsers before, including older versions of IE. With new standards, scripting and virtual machine technologies being implemented in browsers continually, it is expected. It is a simple browser vulnerability, and that is all.
This is not new, if you read Bugtraq, or even Georgi Guninski's page, you will see this and many other exploits are a common occurance in many browsers. Even browsers that handle only plain html like Lynx have been proven vulnerable at times.
Since IE3, many vulnerabilities like this have popped up in MS's browser. IE3 was far worse, as both the Windows and Macintosh platform could both be explotited in terrible ways. Also, we can't forget the famous Netscape Brown Orifice exploit, which Netscape admittedly couldn't even fix in their 4.x series of browsers. I'm sure there are some fine exploits waiting to be found in the lesser used browsers too, but they are just far less reviewed by the security community.
Now I don't think its right that such vulnerabilities exist, but bugs will always be present in software. Internet Explorer just happens to use a lot of mixed technologies and therefore there are more ways for it to be exploited. This is nothing more than someone exploiting a vulnerable version of BIND or RPC. The only difference I find here is that Microsoft is involved, and thus makes a good sensationalist Slashdot target.
By having a huge amount of compatible software?
As far as I know, Apple's products have always been standards compliant and there has always been a good variety of Mac software available for any task. The point of buying the MacOS is mostly for the interface, if you don't want it then install BE, Linux or some other variant.
Why have the trouble to remove Aqua from Darwin
If you just want darwin, you can download it without Aqua. If you have bought OSX, then you will probably not want to remove Aqua anyway.
can you trust a company that can not adopt to better solutions (multiple buttons for example
There are multiple button mice available for Macs. The Macintosh concept is simplicity, and there is no need under the MacOS for two button mice. Everything is designed around one, and it works. PC users constantly complain about the missing button only because they never truly bother to learn how the OS works.
why should I trash my diskette when I only wants to eject it?
There are many ways to eject a disk. If you are too lazy to look under your special menu then that is your loss. Also try pressing COMMAND-E sometime (E=EJECT!)...
I think it's cool that there is more support, but supporting the Geforce 3 before it's out?
Yeah, I've heard that zsh in 3D mode has a great framerate. The accelerated ANSI color rendering is also supposed to be pretty good, though not as fast as in bash or csh...
You're making the incorrect assumption that Microsoft has opened up its source code so that people can trust it.
No, the Bell Labs paper which he linked to (Reflections on Trusting Trust) describes how a compiler can be compromised, thus making examination of source code useless. The point is that they can probe the Windows source all they want, but VisualC could insert the backdoor at compile time. Since they do not have the VC source, they would never know otherwise.
Wow...thats amazing. You were right, my Bible is the New Testament not the Holy Bible like my parents have. Many passages like the ones above are not present...very interesting...