The Lancet Liver Fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum behaves in a similarly creepy way. It starts out infecting snails. When it infects them, the flukes mature for a while, then at a certain point they cause the snail to expel slime balls containing the flukes. The slime balls are eaten by ants. The fluke infects the ants, and change their behavior, causing them to behave normally until evening sets in, when they climb to the top of grasses and clamp on to the leaf with their mandibles, causing a higher lileihood of cows eating them. They then migrate to the liver of the cow, where they live until they deposit eggs, which are pooped out and eaten by snails starting the whole cycle again.
>Depends on what you call "core". Darwin is BSD. Apple didn't open-source it - they took opensource code and used it.
Not exactly. NextStep was based on BSD, but it was based on the Mach kernel, and they diverged from the BSDs in many significant ways as the OS moved forward from NextStep through OpenStep to Mac OS X Server 1.x. With OS X as they opened Darwin they did a lot of merging with Free/Open/NetBSD after that to get up to speed with current libraries and make things more standardized. But when they Open Sourced Darwin it was very much it's own OS unlike any other in many respects and (for better and for worse) and chock-full of proprietary bits (unique kernel interfaces, device drivers, filesystem drivers, et al.)
>Tell me - do you have any idea how Aqua draws translucent windows or how their window manager works ?
Actually Apple does cover a lot of info about how the window manager works, how it composites shadowing, how the back buffering works, etc. to the degree that a developer writing code that uses the WM would need to know to write an app correctly, and the Apple devs on the mailing lists have been pretty good about helping out in the less well documented areas (in my experience). If there is something in particular you are looking for that isn't documented there are channels you can turn to, some free (lists), some not (ADC).
>Have you any idea about what partition system an apple box would use (so that you can dual boot Linux) ? man pdisk OF is an open standard, and setting boot params is well documented. The move to Intel makes things more mysterious, but I am sure they they are not with their implementation so that side isn't documented yet, and we can only specualate where they are headed.
>You miss my point completely. My point was that Apple has always been about proprietary magic. I think you overstate your case. I really think Apple is a conglomerate of different engineering teams with different technical and marketing decisions dictating how open they could be. At WWDC I have talked to a number of Apple engineers working on various parts of the system who would like to open that are currently closed, and they have given various accounts as to why they haven't, some technical, some marketing driven. Also, don't forget that Apple does license some hardware and software from other parties that make it impossible for them to be totally open even if they wanted to be.
The anti-Finder hyperbole seems a bit overblown. The Finder regressed in some ways, it's true, but it advanced in others.
I liked trash on the desktop, pop-up folders, and the spatial consistency of the old Finder, which are gone apparently forever. But I love column view enough that I don't miss the spatial Finder much, the toolbar/sidebar covers the same purpose as pop-up folders, and cmd-Delete is burned in my muscle memory now.
There are some things that are mixed bags in the OS X Finder, but they are getting better. For instance the OS X Finder does dynamic previews of content, which was a blessing and a curse until Tiger when they figured out never to do that for Network volumes, and made the previews act like real icons, so my past complaints are mostly gone (all but performance) and I think the benefit (instant meta-data) oughtweighs the negative (a little slow sometimes).
The OS X info pane has a lot more functionality than the OS 9 info pane (save for setting up share points, where OS 9 kicks OS X's ass). OS X's Finder handles a lot of things that OS 9 didn't do - connections to NFS, SMB, & FTP (those are a part of the Finder).
Up to Jaguar I did think the OS 9 Finder was better since some of the regeressions were painful, but by Panther and later I quit caring - the Finder became quite usable, even if it was different. I am on Tiger now, and I never really think about the OS 9 Finder anymore. Recently I actually found an old 9.2 machine and was actually irritated at the Finder for not behaving more like OS X. Columns can be addictive.
BTW, I wonder if you might have just missed the visual indicator for read-only. When a window for a read only directory is open there is a little pencil with a line through it in the lower left of the window. Though perhaps read-only filesystems don't show them, afraid I can't check just now.
Power Computing is still around, though they sell x86 boxes now.
Af far as the cloes go, Apple was going to go out of business if they didn't stop licensing the OS under the terms that they used. They were bleeding cash like there was no tomorrow, the clones were killing their hardware sales, while the licensing wasn't bringing in any real revenue. It wasn't a predatory business practice - it was done to save their skin.
>It is funny that nobody ever thinks of Apple when they mention questionable business practices
Apple does get mentioned a lot - their treatemt of VARs, their cannibalizing tools that 3rd parties create (Konfabulator, etc), iTunes license changes, et al. Your example of the clones is ancient history, and not an example of a questionable business practice.
>Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted
There are a number of 3rd party utilities that can be installed on Windows to read HFS. A quick Google of Windows HFS will return a number of tools. Apple has not gone after any of the makers of these tools.
Re:Success of PHP easy to understand
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Two other big reasons are
5. It's fast.
6. It is easy for hosting providers to deploy. There are tons of hosting companies out there give customers PHP support because it is easier to support on a box running a bunch of vhosts. Other web scripting environmants either have security issues (mod_perl is really scary if you don't trust other people running on the same host), have limitations for what directories scripts are run from, or are just a PITA to deploy in a simple yet relatively secure way. (That's not to say that PHP apps themselves are secure, but that you can set things up so that when you 0wn the PHP app you don't get much else.)
>For a regular UNIX user, the Macintosh is painfully limiting.
For a regular UNIX user there are Fink and DarwinPorts, if a regular UNIX user is suffering it is because they don't know what is available to them, not out of a limit of what is available.
I think you put the wrong link in there. That is a dual core CPU, but not really a G4, it's an embedded controller with a PPC core. Great for a router, not appropriate for a PowerBook.
>I never expected a G5 Powerbook. I can not conceive of the confusion of mind that would lead anyone to expect a G5 Powerbook.
That is enough of a troll to indicate this conversation is over. Ciao.
>The only heartbreak is the Steve Jobs said "3 MHz in a year" and it didn't happen.
No, another heartbreaker was no G5 PowerBook, and not only that, but no POSSIBILITY of a G5 PowerBook. A liquid cooled G5 PowerBook with six fans and a backpack mounted battery doesn't sound like a good seller. Meanwhile notebooks are becoming top selling computers and the G4 PowerBooks keep looking comparatively more anemic than their x86 cousins. Apple was getting screwed by their chip vendors, Freescale most notably. Freescale hosed Apple as badly as IBM, really. The top of the line PowerBook still has a 1.67 Gz G4.
Dual core Pentium Ms are on the roadmap. Dual Core G4s aren't. Dual core G5s would probably need liquid nitrogen cooling in a portable.
That wasn't just a heartbreaker. For a long term view it was a dealbreaker for Apple. Even though Mz for Mz the Pentium M is not fast as a G4, it doesn't matter when the Pentium runs cooler, gets better battery life, and runs at such a comparitively higher clock that it's still faster.
Beyond that Steve knows a lot more about which chips have legs legs than you or I, he has talked to the people at Intel, Freescale, and IBM who know the roadmaps, and one has to assume he chose based on that knowledge. Steve doesn't just draw decisions that stake the future of a company like this out of a hat.
Exactly, if Apple switched to an x86 CPU for their computers (which is really doubtful), they would inevitably keep using an Open Firmware based system with a proprietary boot ROM, and a system bus unlike anything in your standard PC. You would never see Mac OS X booting on a Dell.
>The file system supports file names longer than the Mac ever did.
This is not correct. Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X support filenames that are 255 Unicode character in length. Mac OS 8.6 and earlier had the 31 char filename limit.
Sometimes people find that Perl is the right tool for their needs. At my company we have many internal tools written in Perl, and see no reason to change. We have a heterogeneous environment, so.Net is right out.
The apps we have work very well, and are well written (modular, use OO, and always use 'strict), so they are easy to maintain, and - get this - very easy to read for a professional coder who knows some Perl. Stuff like HTML::Template/Template::Toolkit, Class:DBI, and other modules are really nice to work with, and keep things very clean. While you can write hard to read Perl, we have code style guidelines that prevent this from being a real issue.
We also use Java/Swing for some tools, especially GUI apps (that way we can run them on OS X, Linux, and Windows with a fair amount of cross-platform compatibility), and use C for tools where performance really matters. But Perl is faster to develop with, and easier to maintain.
We have a few PHP web apps that we are rewriting to run under mod_perl. The performance differences are minimal, but Perl has a lot more power for a developer (CPAN is an order of magnitude better than PEAR, etc). We also want to get off PHP since it is an unstable target (many version updates cause breeakage), and currently the tools have code and html mixed together. PHP's default way of mixing model, view, and controller together is a bitch to work with. Once you start to abstract things and use templates PHP loses its original strength. Since we need to rewrite them anyway to clean up that awful mess, porting to Perl is a straightforward choice.
Here is the list of the top level comments prior to yours that were modded down: 1) Never used it. What's the big deal? 2) FP 3) dead language. 4) offshoring myths 5) if the server is running it the slashdot effect will kill it. 6) Is there anyone left who hasn't switched to Ruby or Python? 7) Who still uses Perl for web stuff?
All were either totally OT, or obvious language-war trolls, save #1 which was wasn't a critical post.
AFAICT it looks like the moderation system is working quite well.
There is a fairly large subset of Christians in the U.S. who really want to hide from modern society. They are threatened by secular society, threatened by contemporary culture, threatened by modern science, etc. Marketing escapist stuff that helps to reinforce their little worldview would certainly be a cash cow.
Apple also includes command line tools such as 'defaults' for editing plists so that you can edit them and make sure that you wind up with a valid plist in the end. There's a new tool in Tiger, but I can't recall
Perl on OS X also includes the ObjC bridge which can be used to easily read a plist in as a hash. From there it is easy to edit it and then dump it back out.
So in Mac OS X there are tools to easily read and modify the plists. If porting launchd to another platform, then making comparable tools for plist reading and editing would be needed.
Application as a directory was not an Apple innovation at all. The application package (.app) was a design inherited from NeXT, it was part of the original NextStep release.
" almost nobody who really understood the unix permissions model needs ACLs"
I understand unix perms full well, and I occasionally need ACLs. One user, one group, and world is, in some cases, a very painful limitation. Yeah you can usually work around the limitations by making yet more groups, and other annoying to maintain hacks, but there are cases where I have been completely stuck and there was no way to get unix perms to work in the way that a department wanted.
For instance, a dept. has content creators that should have a share be a drop box for them. They have content editors that should have read write to that share. They also have tools that publish the content from that directory. Those tools should have read only since they should not be able to touch the content, only publish. Unix permissions cannot handle that, so you have to soften things up somewhere, giving someone more privileges than you want. This is just a recent example, I have run into wanting ACLs many many times, where the unix modle is just to brittle.
On a home or development box, unix perms are fine.
On a webserver, they're fine.
On a file server with lots of departments using shares in different ways, unix permissions suck.
This has nothing to do with cancer fears or even GM food. The modified rice is genetically enhanced with synthetic human genes to produce lactoferrin and lysozyme, which are intended to be used in medicines so they would be very likely affect someone who consumed them. They are afraid that the modified rice could cross pollinate with standard rice. It is well known that pollen can travel large distances, so the possibility of contamination is very real and could in theory have serious negative consequences. It may be that their concerns are unfounded, but that is really something that only an expert could make the call on.
MS has already borrowed BSD code in the past, it's fine, and nobody seems to have a problem with it. The license encourages it.
"Whether they admit it or not is beside the point. " No - depending on the BSD license, they might need to 'admit' it, in the copyright notice sense of the term 'admit', in which case if they violated the license they would be worthy of scorn.
If they go borrowing Linux code, that's a whole different thing, and unless they GPLed all the code involved with that borrowing, we would be right to hate them. Even assuming they released the code GPLed, then they would be hypocrites and would deserve severe criticism for it.
"And what if, either through using a UNIX core, or taking what's there and advancing it to the next level, Microsoft really gets it right this time?"
I think most of the folks that hate MS hate them first and foremost for their predatory business practices, and secondly for their actual product. I am one of those people in the 'MS is evil due to their business practices' crowd. I'd say that over time their products really have gotten better, and I would be really pleased if they continued to make their products better. Competition based on merit is a good thing. But it wouldn't make them any less evil. To make them less evil would require they change their ways and compensate for past wrongs, which I can't see ever happening.
Hello friend, I take this as a very lucky chance that you happen to have noticed me. You see, I take great delight in learning, and I find that little is a better teacher than finding someone who disagrees with me. For from such a person I either learn that I held a view in error, in which case I become the wiser, or I find that in fact my view was not in error, in which case I am more confident that the view I hold can stand up to criticism.
Sadly, at the same time as I am delighted at finding you, I am afraid that while you seem to disagree with me somehow, you seem to not be sharing whatever secret wisdom you have. Please don't hold out on me. If I am ignorant, I beg that you enlighten me with regard to the specific point where my knowledge has failed.
I studied Greek Philosophy for eight years before reading the book (I read it for "fun" in Grad school). I also minored in Religious Studies with a focus in Eastern thought (I read a lot of Zen and Taoist works). I can guarantee you that I hated that steaming heap of ignorant dreck a lot more than you. When I see it on a bookshelf I still get worked up and want to launch into diatribes about his ignorant ham-fisted abuse of Plato, Aristotle, and Greek thought in general, and what an utterly vapid pile of tripe his whole pathetic attempt at a philosophical study was. My wife usually steps in and stops me, though, since not all of those incidents went well.
In the U.S. journalists typically do have their sources protected, which is why don't now who "deep throat," who leaked that Valerie Plame was an agent, and so on.
This case has the special twist because the "journalists" in this case are essentially businessmen who are profiting from disseminating information that can only be gained by encouraging others to break the law. An extreme but somewhat fitting analogy would be to compare the case to people who create a 'snuff' film and then try to avoid naming the murderer in the film by claiming that they are journalists.
I have had to deal with a lot of Perl, Java, and PHP. The nastiest ugliest code I ever inherited was PHP. I agree that Python tends to be more readable since it has a more limited... expressiveness... than Perl, but PHP with it's endless heap of little functions that do nearly the same thing and its oddly inconsistent namespace can mutate as readily as Perl, especially when wielded by an inexperienced programmer.
"That's part of the reason PHP exists--so you don't have to worry about that sort of thing."
The bugtraq archives of the last few years make it plenty clear that magic quotes will do nothing to protect you from CSS attacks. CSS attacks against PHP web apps are painfully common. Magic quote may protect you from SQL injection attacks (or may not if you use stripslashes and a bug sneaks in).
You *have* to worry about this sort of thing, no matter what language you are using. Eeven if it theoretically should be hardened you should still worry a bit, IMHO. I do quite agree that the question is 'whether PHP provides convenience or a blindfold.'
Slashdot Mirror
The Lancet Liver Fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum behaves in a similarly creepy way. It starts out infecting snails. When it infects them, the flukes mature for a while, then at a certain point they cause the snail to expel slime balls containing the flukes. The slime balls are eaten by ants. The fluke infects the ants, and change their behavior, causing them to behave normally until evening sets in, when they climb to the top of grasses and clamp on to the leaf with their mandibles, causing a higher lileihood of cows eating them. They then migrate to the liver of the cow, where they live until they deposit eggs, which are pooped out and eaten by snails starting the whole cycle again.
>Depends on what you call "core". Darwin is BSD. Apple didn't open-source it - they took opensource code and used it.
Not exactly. NextStep was based on BSD, but it was based on the Mach kernel, and they diverged from the BSDs in many significant ways as the OS moved forward from NextStep through OpenStep to Mac OS X Server 1.x. With OS X as they opened Darwin they did a lot of merging with Free/Open/NetBSD after that to get up to speed with current libraries and make things more standardized. But when they Open Sourced Darwin it was very much it's own OS unlike any other in many respects and (for better and for worse) and chock-full of proprietary bits (unique kernel interfaces, device drivers, filesystem drivers, et al.)
>Tell me - do you have any idea how Aqua draws translucent windows or how their window manager works ?
Actually Apple does cover a lot of info about how the window manager works, how it composites shadowing, how the back buffering works, etc. to the degree that a developer writing code that uses the WM would need to know to write an app correctly, and the Apple devs on the mailing lists have been pretty good about helping out in the less well documented areas (in my experience). If there is something in particular you are looking for that isn't documented there are channels you can turn to, some free (lists), some not (ADC).
>Have you any idea about what partition system an apple box would use (so that you can dual boot Linux) ?
man pdisk
OF is an open standard, and setting boot params is well documented. The move to Intel makes things more mysterious, but I am sure they they are not with their implementation so that side isn't documented yet, and we can only specualate where they are headed.
>You miss my point completely. My point was that Apple has always been about proprietary magic.
I think you overstate your case. I really think Apple is a conglomerate of different engineering teams with different technical and marketing decisions dictating how open they could be. At WWDC I have talked to a number of Apple engineers working on various parts of the system who would like to open that are currently closed, and they have given various accounts as to why they haven't, some technical, some marketing driven. Also, don't forget that Apple does license some hardware and software from other parties that make it impossible for them to be totally open even if they wanted to be.
>I suppose that the Slashdot crowd knows much more about this topic than Elspa
Why would anyone ever suppose that Slashdotters know about women?
The anti-Finder hyperbole seems a bit overblown. The Finder regressed in some ways, it's true, but it advanced in others.
I liked trash on the desktop, pop-up folders, and the spatial consistency of the old Finder, which are gone apparently forever. But I love column view enough that I don't miss the spatial Finder much, the toolbar/sidebar covers the same purpose as pop-up folders, and cmd-Delete is burned in my muscle memory now.
There are some things that are mixed bags in the OS X Finder, but they are getting better. For instance the OS X Finder does dynamic previews of content, which was a blessing and a curse until Tiger when they figured out never to do that for Network volumes, and made the previews act like real icons, so my past complaints are mostly gone (all but performance) and I think the benefit (instant meta-data) oughtweighs the negative (a little slow sometimes).
The OS X info pane has a lot more functionality than the OS 9 info pane (save for setting up share points, where OS 9 kicks OS X's ass). OS X's Finder handles a lot of things that OS 9 didn't do - connections to NFS, SMB, & FTP (those are a part of the Finder).
Up to Jaguar I did think the OS 9 Finder was better since some of the regeressions were painful, but by Panther and later I quit caring - the Finder became quite usable, even if it was different. I am on Tiger now, and I never really think about the OS 9 Finder anymore. Recently I actually found an old 9.2 machine and was actually irritated at the Finder for not behaving more like OS X. Columns can be addictive.
BTW, I wonder if you might have just missed the visual indicator for read-only. When a window for a read only directory is open there is a little pencil with a line through it in the lower left of the window. Though perhaps read-only filesystems don't show them, afraid I can't check just now.
>I guess Power Computing folded
Power Computing is still around, though they sell x86 boxes now.
Af far as the cloes go, Apple was going to go out of business if they didn't stop licensing the OS under the terms that they used. They were bleeding cash like there was no tomorrow, the clones were killing their hardware sales, while the licensing wasn't bringing in any real revenue. It wasn't a predatory business practice - it was done to save their skin.
>It is funny that nobody ever thinks of Apple when they mention questionable business practices
Apple does get mentioned a lot - their treatemt of VARs, their cannibalizing tools that 3rd parties create (Konfabulator, etc), iTunes license changes, et al. Your example of the clones is ancient history, and not an example of a questionable business practice.
>Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted
There are a number of 3rd party utilities that can be installed on Windows to read HFS. A quick Google of Windows HFS will return a number of tools. Apple has not gone after any of the makers of these tools.
Two other big reasons are
5. It's fast.
6. It is easy for hosting providers to deploy. There are tons of hosting companies out there give customers PHP support because it is easier to support on a box running a bunch of vhosts. Other web scripting environmants either have security issues (mod_perl is really scary if you don't trust other people running on the same host), have limitations for what directories scripts are run from, or are just a PITA to deploy in a simple yet relatively secure way. (That's not to say that PHP apps themselves are secure, but that you can set things up so that when you 0wn the PHP app you don't get much else.)
>For a regular UNIX user, the Macintosh is painfully limiting.
For a regular UNIX user there are Fink and DarwinPorts, if a regular UNIX user is suffering it is because they don't know what is available to them, not out of a limit of what is available.
I think you put the wrong link in there. That is a dual core CPU, but not really a G4, it's an embedded controller with a PPC core. Great for a router, not appropriate for a PowerBook.
>I never expected a G5 Powerbook. I can not conceive of the confusion of mind that would lead anyone to expect a G5 Powerbook.
That is enough of a troll to indicate this conversation is over. Ciao.
>The only heartbreak is the Steve Jobs said "3 MHz in a year" and it didn't happen.
No, another heartbreaker was no G5 PowerBook, and not only that, but no POSSIBILITY of a G5 PowerBook. A liquid cooled G5 PowerBook with six fans and a backpack mounted battery doesn't sound like a good seller. Meanwhile notebooks are becoming top selling computers and the G4 PowerBooks keep looking comparatively more anemic than their x86 cousins. Apple was getting screwed by their chip vendors, Freescale most notably. Freescale hosed Apple as badly as IBM, really. The top of the line PowerBook still has a 1.67 Gz G4.
Dual core Pentium Ms are on the roadmap. Dual Core G4s aren't. Dual core G5s would probably need liquid nitrogen cooling in a portable.
That wasn't just a heartbreaker. For a long term view it was a dealbreaker for Apple. Even though Mz for Mz the Pentium M is not fast as a G4, it doesn't matter when the Pentium runs cooler, gets better battery life, and runs at such a comparitively higher clock that it's still faster.
Beyond that Steve knows a lot more about which chips have legs legs than you or I, he has talked to the people at Intel, Freescale, and IBM who know the roadmaps, and one has to assume he chose based on that knowledge. Steve doesn't just draw decisions that stake the future of a company like this out of a hat.
Exactly, if Apple switched to an x86 CPU for their computers (which is really doubtful), they would inevitably keep using an Open Firmware based system with a proprietary boot ROM, and a system bus unlike anything in your standard PC. You would never see Mac OS X booting on a Dell.
>The file system supports file names longer than the Mac ever did.
This is not correct. Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X support filenames that are 255 Unicode character in length. Mac OS 8.6 and earlier had the 31 char filename limit.
Sometimes people find that Perl is the right tool for their needs. At my company we have many internal tools written in Perl, and see no reason to change. We have a heterogeneous environment, so .Net is right out.
The apps we have work very well, and are well written (modular, use OO, and always use 'strict), so they are easy to maintain, and - get this - very easy to read for a professional coder who knows some Perl. Stuff like HTML::Template/Template::Toolkit, Class:DBI, and other modules are really nice to work with, and keep things very clean. While you can write hard to read Perl, we have code style guidelines that prevent this from being a real issue.
We also use Java/Swing for some tools, especially GUI apps (that way we can run them on OS X, Linux, and Windows with a fair amount of cross-platform compatibility), and use C for tools where performance really matters. But Perl is faster to develop with, and easier to maintain.
We have a few PHP web apps that we are rewriting to run under mod_perl. The performance differences are minimal, but Perl has a lot more power for a developer (CPAN is an order of magnitude better than PEAR, etc). We also want to get off PHP since it is an unstable target (many version updates cause breeakage), and currently the tools have code and html mixed together. PHP's default way of mixing model, view, and controller together is a bitch to work with. Once you start to abstract things and use templates PHP loses its original strength. Since we need to rewrite them anyway to clean up that awful mess, porting to Perl is a straightforward choice.
Here is the list of the top level comments prior to yours that were modded down:
1) Never used it. What's the big deal?
2) FP
3) dead language.
4) offshoring myths
5) if the server is running it the slashdot effect will kill it.
6) Is there anyone left who hasn't switched to Ruby or Python?
7) Who still uses Perl for web stuff?
All were either totally OT, or obvious language-war trolls, save #1 which was wasn't a critical post.
AFAICT it looks like the moderation system is working quite well.
There is a fairly large subset of Christians in the U.S. who really want to hide from modern society. They are threatened by secular society, threatened by contemporary culture, threatened by modern science, etc. Marketing escapist stuff that helps to reinforce their little worldview would certainly be a cash cow.
Apple also includes command line tools such as 'defaults' for editing plists so that you can edit them and make sure that you wind up with a valid plist in the end. There's a new tool in Tiger, but I can't recall
Perl on OS X also includes the ObjC bridge which can be used to easily read a plist in as a hash. From there it is easy to edit it and then dump it back out.
So in Mac OS X there are tools to easily read and modify the plists. If porting launchd to another platform, then making comparable tools for plist reading and editing would be needed.
Application as a directory was not an Apple innovation at all. The application package (.app) was a design inherited from NeXT, it was part of the original NextStep release.
" almost nobody who really understood the unix permissions model needs ACLs"
I understand unix perms full well, and I occasionally need ACLs. One user, one group, and world is, in some cases, a very painful limitation. Yeah you can usually work around the limitations by making yet more groups, and other annoying to maintain hacks, but there are cases where I have been completely stuck and there was no way to get unix perms to work in the way that a department wanted.
For instance, a dept. has content creators that should have a share be a drop box for them. They have content editors that should have read write to that share. They also have tools that publish the content from that directory. Those tools should have read only since they should not be able to touch the content, only publish. Unix permissions cannot handle that, so you have to soften things up somewhere, giving someone more privileges than you want. This is just a recent example, I have run into wanting ACLs many many times, where the unix modle is just to brittle.
On a home or development box, unix perms are fine.
On a webserver, they're fine.
On a file server with lots of departments using shares in different ways, unix permissions suck.
This has nothing to do with cancer fears or even GM food. The modified rice is genetically enhanced with synthetic human genes to produce lactoferrin and lysozyme, which are intended to be used in medicines so they would be very likely affect someone who consumed them. They are afraid that the modified rice could cross pollinate with standard rice. It is well known that pollen can travel large distances, so the possibility of contamination is very real and could in theory have serious negative consequences. It may be that their concerns are unfounded, but that is really something that only an expert could make the call on.
MS has already borrowed BSD code in the past, it's fine, and nobody seems to have a problem with it. The license encourages it.
"Whether they admit it or not is beside the point. " No - depending on the BSD license, they might need to 'admit' it, in the copyright notice sense of the term 'admit', in which case if they violated the license they would be worthy of scorn.
If they go borrowing Linux code, that's a whole different thing, and unless they GPLed all the code involved with that borrowing, we would be right to hate them. Even assuming they released the code GPLed, then they would be hypocrites and would deserve severe criticism for it.
"And what if, either through using a UNIX core, or taking what's there and advancing it to the next level, Microsoft really gets it right this time?"
I think most of the folks that hate MS hate them first and foremost for their predatory business practices, and secondly for their actual product. I am one of those people in the 'MS is evil due to their business practices' crowd. I'd say that over time their products really have gotten better, and I would be really pleased if they continued to make their products better. Competition based on merit is a good thing. But it wouldn't make them any less evil. To make them less evil would require they change their ways and compensate for past wrongs, which I can't see ever happening.
Hello friend, I take this as a very lucky chance that you happen to have noticed me. You see, I take great delight in learning, and I find that little is a better teacher than finding someone who disagrees with me. For from such a person I either learn that I held a view in error, in which case I become the wiser, or I find that in fact my view was not in error, in which case I am more confident that the view I hold can stand up to criticism.
Sadly, at the same time as I am delighted at finding you, I am afraid that while you seem to disagree with me somehow, you seem to not be sharing whatever secret wisdom you have. Please don't hold out on me. If I am ignorant, I beg that you enlighten me with regard to the specific point where my knowledge has failed.
I studied Greek Philosophy for eight years before reading the book (I read it for "fun" in Grad school). I also minored in Religious Studies with a focus in Eastern thought (I read a lot of Zen and Taoist works). I can guarantee you that I hated that steaming heap of ignorant dreck a lot more than you. When I see it on a bookshelf I still get worked up and want to launch into diatribes about his ignorant ham-fisted abuse of Plato, Aristotle, and Greek thought in general, and what an utterly vapid pile of tripe his whole pathetic attempt at a philosophical study was. My wife usually steps in and stops me, though, since not all of those incidents went well.
Yeah, they've been giving credit pretty much since the release of OS X. You can find the old blurbs here:
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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30
In the U.S. journalists typically do have their sources protected, which is why don't now who "deep throat," who leaked that Valerie Plame was an agent, and so on.
This case has the special twist because the "journalists" in this case are essentially businessmen who are profiting from disseminating information that can only be gained by encouraging others to break the law. An extreme but somewhat fitting analogy would be to compare the case to people who create a 'snuff' film and then try to avoid naming the murderer in the film by claiming that they are journalists.
I have had to deal with a lot of Perl, Java, and PHP. The nastiest ugliest code I ever inherited was PHP. I agree that Python tends to be more readable since it has a more limited... expressiveness... than Perl, but PHP with it's endless heap of little functions that do nearly the same thing and its oddly inconsistent namespace can mutate as readily as Perl, especially when wielded by an inexperienced programmer.
"That's part of the reason PHP exists--so you don't have to worry about that sort of thing."
The bugtraq archives of the last few years make it plenty clear that magic quotes will do nothing to protect you from CSS attacks. CSS attacks against PHP web apps are painfully common. Magic quote may protect you from SQL injection attacks (or may not if you use stripslashes and a bug sneaks in).
You *have* to worry about this sort of thing, no matter what language you are using. Eeven if it theoretically should be hardened you should still worry a bit, IMHO. I do quite agree that the question is 'whether PHP provides convenience or a blindfold.'