The point of the article was not that the systems had defects (the article notes that the X-Box rate of failure was in line with competitors). The point was the bad customer experience people were having when they had defective units and did what they were "supposed to do" (call Microsoft). Personally if I bought any bad console I would never call the mf'r, I would go to the store where I bought it and either demand a refund or a replacement, but that is not what MS wants you to do.
As far as NFS goes, there are free utilities (mentioned above) to make this easy to set up. Granted Apple should have included some tool to do a similar thing, but the tool does exist. If you have moral issues with using it, then dig in to the NetInfo man pages, and have fun. Do note that there is a netinfo (3) and a netinfo (8) page. When I need to mount shares I now use the Finder's 'connect to' and enter the url in this form "nfs://host.domain.net/path/to/share/" It mounts just like an SMB of AFP share, making it more Mac-like. I know a lot of people who use NFS mouting and automounting who never have seen any problems, so I think you just need to bear with learning how it works on Mac OS X.
As far as NIS goes, there are tutorials on setting this up (the best being How to integrate Mac OS X in an NIS environment. I have set up NIS on a 10.0.4 system with no hassles (and it survived the 10.1 update fine), so I think you just need to look into it a little more. It is not hard. We still have a Mac OS X system bound to our Sun for testing setups, and it was straightforward to set up. Setting up Mac OS X as an NIS master is a hairy (though possible), if that was what you wanted to do, I would recommend that you just use something else. Mac OS X's UNIXness has at its core OpenSTEP, which is whhere the way of setting up both NIS and NFS comes from. OpenSTEP used to have a cool NetworkManger.app that made setting up NIS a lot better, though sadly it is gone now. It is a UNIX even if it is a bit weird compared to the rest. To make it behave more normally, you can change lookupd's lookup order to read the FFAgent first, so that all those files in/etc/ will be read instead of NetInfo.
Finally as far as SMB goes, this does not seem to me to be much related to a UNIX thing, since it is a Windows protocol. As far as mounting SMB shares, it is the same as AFP or NFS - use the GUI. I don't use SMB much, but I never saw problems. I expect that if it is broken updates will be coming.
As far as ease of use goes, mounting NFS or SMB share sis really easy, and the rest is not what the typical Mac user would ever deal with. Apple has limited resources, and puts its focus on making core groups happy. I feel it is safe to say that NIS integration is not going to be high on the list.
I do agree that currently on the *NIX side others are more mature, Mac OS X's core hasn't changed a lot since OpenStep 4.2 in a lot of ways, and it certainly needs work. With Jordan Hubbard on board working to get the *NIX side in sync with FreeBSD I think it should mature nicely, and you can always contribute to Darwin if you get a bee in your bonnet, it's open.
Those are all disanalogies. Some closer analogies (I do not think that there are any that are really good), might be:
You buy a music CD make a copy of it and give it to a friend. This is the closest, but it is so close as to hardly be an analogy.
You buy a novel and photocopy it. Less close, still the same issue, copyright violation.
You buy a crappy Chrysler in '86, and then build a factory in your back yard and produce an exact duplicate Chrysler. Not as close, but closer the remarkably weak analogies you offered.
You go to McDonalds, dressed as an employee. You walk behind the counter and pretend to take orders, exactly copying the movements of your neighboring employees. Not close at all, but pretty much as good as analogy as your goofy McDonalds one.
The crux of copyright viloation is that duplicating something is illegal. Some people think that duplication is not immoral, some do not. If you are going to argue about this with an analogy, you need to make one that illustrates a moral issue by an act of copying. Perhaps you might take the license approach and say that those who copy are violating a license, so those who get upset about GPL or BSD license violations (I know I do) should be just as upset at illegal copying of software. I think that that is a better analogy, though still needing work.
Nice flame. Cracking passwords can be considered an innocent activity when it is part of a security audit. In fact password crackers are a legitimate part of many a sysadmin's tools when they need to verify that no users are using weak passwords. The reason that Randall got burned by a felony conviction was because he was said to gain by the act. Intel testified that they believed that the specific benefit that Randal would have received would be recognition when he showed his employer a security weakness (not exploiting the system to steal IP, wreak financial havoc on the company, etc.).
No doubt poor communications and a lack of judgment were a part of this, but the severity of the punishment for this is absurd, and the degree to which Intel manipulated the legal system (they went with the police when they searched Randal's home) ideally should have gotten the case thrown out (IMHO).
Intel did push to get Schwartz behind bars, and he is really lucky that he did not do time. In this case the nature of punishment certainly does not fit the crime, and Randal certainly should have done everything in his power to rectify it.
You are right in that since MS email server/client architecture out of the box creates these sort of disasters, so dolts who run a crappy ass install of a crappy ass server with a crappy client with crappy ass users then you do deserve whatever you get.
But still, kids will be kids. Cracking down hard on kids does not stop kids from being kids, it just makes mean spirited adults feel better. Kids who write viruses do not deserve to go to jail, and putting them there solves nothing, it just makes adults with child-like feelings feel vindicated.
If adults write viruses it is a whole different story, but I know enough kids who were screwed over by insanely harsh penalties who could have wound up doing a lot of good for society, but instead I now work with them in jail, and hear the hate that they now have for all authority (due to stupid adults acting out on their child-like feelings).
These are not pretend people, or abstractions, these are real kids. Saying that it is okay to put a kid in jail for writing a computer program is absolutely insane.
As far as a) goes, MS email server/client architecture out of the box creates these sort of disasters. It is only with 3rd party addons / a non-default configuration that these things get fixed.
That is a serious issue that MS should be held accountable for, not some kids who notice how easy it is to exploit.
As far as the impact on businesses goes, if they foolishly choose a system that puts security and stability as priorities that are secondary to convenience they deserve to go out of business.
With respect to b), the hoodlum here is the company who designed a system so easy to exploit, not some kids who noticed this and did so. Businesses that have adopted MS solutions and as a consequence of this have to deal with the financial burden of bouncing and disinfecting their infrastructure should join in filing class action suits against MS, not encourage putting kids in jail for being kids.
I honestly don't see why people like bash so much, but being one of those zsh users, to me bash seems so lacking in useful features comparatively. zsh on OS X can be made to behave just like bash if you want that behavior. By default it is useless, but once you've set up a good.zshrc it sings. Take a look at zsh.org for more info.
Interestingly Mac OS X uses zsh for its sh emulation, and Jordan Hubbard was on the darwin lists explaining that they are planning to move to bash for sh emulation since it is more lightweight and seemed to help performance a lot for sh intensive things like configuring, and making certain software packages where lots of instances of sh were called up. I was hoping they would use FreeBSD's sh or ash or something more lightweight than bash, but bash is still better than zsh for sh emulation.
Fink is a port of the debian package management tools combined with a source based install system. By defauly many Open Source tools need a few tweaks to get them to compile on Mac OS X. Fink automated those tweaks. So you can just use apt/dselect to get software installed, of use 'fink install xxx' and have it automatically download compile and install the software (making a deb file in the process). And it does it without clobbering any of the default system (unlike GNU Darwin - grrr).
Intel's 802.11A cards do look kind of interesting, but really for a home user 11 megabits is plenty of throughput. Modem users are sucking down 56k (and Airport is aimed at folks with modems - note the AOL compatibility). Standard DSL connections peak at 1.5, and cable at its best gets 3 (but not very often in my experience). So the bottleneck isn't the wireless LAN for home users, which are who Apple is marketing this to along with K-12 who typically don't have impressive bandwidth either). If you were in a corporate environment and were using local servers I could maybe see wanting the added bandwidth, but Airport isn't trying to go there.
On the Linksys product page for the one I have:
http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid =2 3
they have a link 'Macintosh Installation Instructions', which points to this article:
http://www.macworld.com/2000/12/01/howto/router. ht ml
This article explains how to upgrade the Firmware using a Mac.
I followed the steps with my Mac, and they worked fine. Mac OS X has a tftp client that you can use, but there is no GUI.
For this to come up you need to have multiple partitions, one of which is named 'Applications.' This is not too common, but it is done. I knew a guy who did graphic design who did this, I always though it was kind of dumb back then, since apps not running on the boot volume in Mac OS 8.1 - 9.x took a performance/VM hit. It doesn't have that impact on X, but I still don't see much benefit.
Hmmm. I have a Jornada that has mostly sat in a drawer now for two months. This is because I won a Palm V. I liked the Jornada, though it was a little too big to carry around in my pocket comfortably, but once I played with the Palm, I found that while the Palm does not have all the gimmicks that the Jornada has, it is infinitely more useful. The Palm UI is clearly years ahead of the PocketPC UI, and given MS's tendencies, I do not think that it will ever improve. Plus there are a lot more *useful* apps for the Palm. I use it for grocery lists, to dos, scheduling, contacts, and other useful things, and it excels. On the Jornada I could get these things to work, but I was always fighting it to make it work. Anyone who thinks that they will be playing a FPS on their PDA for more than a month is probably mistaken, and while I was able to impress my friends for a while with the 'gee-whiz' factor of the multimedia stuff, it is honestly pretty poor, and no substitute for a real laptop. All of the 'features' that the PocketPC touts over the Palm are impressive loking at first, but ultimately useless to me.
When I first started running X I was annoyed at the UI changes, but after a while I started to use them, and now I think that OS 9 is pretty awkward. The Finder's toolbar/shelf is really handy, and is far nicer than tabbed folders, and Column view is really handy once you get used to it. I miss labels too, you should submit feedback about that.
There is a tool called ASM if you clamor for the App Switcher in the upper righ like I do, that I use all the time. It makes things feel a lot more like OS 9.
The Dock tries to do less in 10.1 than it does in 10.0.x (menu items taking over), so maybe things are heading away from the Swiss Army Dock. I think the Dock can be fairly handy, and as it evolves I bet it will get better.
Mac OS X has two file linking items, links (hard or soft), and aliases. The first was inherited from UNIXland, the latter from Macs starting with System 7. I think that they prefer aliases (there is o GUI way to make soft links) probably because aliases are more user friendly, since you can move the original file and an alias will still resolve, and if it fails the OS will ask you to locate the original. Unfortunately, they each work a little differently, and each have their quirks when your filesystem is shared (via FTP, HTTP, AFP, SMB, etc.). The default behavior for SMB shares is to copy aliases as a file, but to follow symlinks. I think that this is probably a bug, and it should treat each as a sort of stub file. You can actually submit feedback if it bugs you.
You can register for free with ADC and file the bug at https://bugreport.apple.com/.
As far as the release date goes, I do not care so much when they released it, as much as that it was solid.
I have to say that with the Tab interface, support for the LINKS toolbar, and all of the other cool things Moz has been picking up lately, it is really becoming a brilliant application. I cringe when I am stuck using I.E. now.
I tried very hard to reproduce this but could not. A lot of folks are misunderstanding the difference between just decoding - which does happen and which is not a major security concern (you opted to download the file, after all), and decoding and executing the file (which would be bad, but which I cannot get to happen, despite a number of tries).
I have two OS X 10.1 systems. I do not use IE (mozilla is superior), so they have default prefs. I went to versiontracker, downloaded a few binhexed files and in each case it decoded the file (which is corect behavior, and not a significant security risk), but did not attempt to execute the file. On the first system I tested my user's home is an NFS export, so I tested with a local user with a local home, and I even created a new user with a local home, and in no case was I able to reproduce this. I went to my PowerBook and tested there, and I also was not able to reproduce. Something fishy is going on here. Either the report is false (which I am inclined to believe - most who are verifying this are just reporting that the file is decoded which is not a major security concern), or there are other conditions that need to be met (which I would be interested to hear).
Classic's transparency is a virtue, which allows for a necessary integration. It is very bad UI to have a whole runtime living in a separate window. The old Blue Box was clearly short lived for a reason, trueblue kicks it's ass in both performance, and usability.
In current Mac OS X the Genie effect can be replaced by the 'scale' effect if you want it, HD aliases can go in the dock (or you can use an Apple Menu replacement if you really want to - they exist). The Finder toolbar allows you to put whatever foders you want in it, which works far more nicely that the pop-up windows (or tabbed folders as you call them).
It is true that you do not have the option to use labels currently (or folder colors, as you called them), and I would suggest that if you miss it you give Apple feedback to that effect. I have, and I know there is a Radar bug on it. More feedback = better chance it will appear in 10.2 (or whatever the next releaase will be called).
As far as file comments go, they exist in Mac OS X, you show how little you actually tried to use the system by that comment. I am running 10.1 as my production system, I do not find that I am any less productive than I was on 9.x. After I lived with the changes to the UI, I discovered (somewhat reluctantly in places) that they are mostly improvements over OS 9. I do not run Classic often, but apps run at close enough to native speed that I have never noticed it, and benchmarks done (on xlr8yourmac) show that at worst you are typically looking at a 5% performance drop - I seriously doubt that MOL would offer better performance.
You might want to actually test the system for longer than the ten minutes or so it appears you spent with Public Beta or DP 3, or whatever you were using, so that you know what it is you are writing off.
Re:It is not so simple as just blaming lazy admins
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In a way this seems worse. MS has what would be a solution that could have cut the damage this sort of worm did by a fair amount, but instead of having it installed by default, you have to go to their update web page. I realize that Windows Update is fairly easy to use (I updated my W2K box that way), but this should really be installed and enabled by default, and disabled by folks who are the 'power users,' who do not want it running.
It is not so simple as just blaming lazy admins
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I have been monitoring my logs, and most of the hits I get are from Cable/DSL users. I bet a lot of these people are unaware that they are even running IIS, let alone that they need to install a security patch. I have not used W2k much (set up a test server at work, and reboot it now and then when it fails mysteriously), so I guess by default there is no automatic "Your Software needs updating" dialog that pesters you. If MS had their SW configured to do a weekly check and let users know that updates were available it would help. I know that Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X do this and it is useful for making sure systems stay current, and I wrote a few scripts that run as cron job on my Debian box at home that do apt-get update weekly, and mail me if there is a security update. Maybe something like this is already there in W2K (though if it is it sould be surprising), and I just have never seen it, I apologize if I speak from ignorance, but if there is not, then MS needs to get on the ball. Their software is causing a lot of problems, and they need to be more active in making sure that their boxes get updated.
What makes you think that Apple does not think it is great that people hack Macs and write their own software for them? I would think it is safe to assume they think it will increase the popularity of the product. While it is obvious that Apple wants software on their platform, even on the OS level, Apple did sponsor the MkLinux project, and while Apple did not work with the NetBSD team on the port per se, there were folks from Apple who did contribute. Currently the innards of OS X are open, and they would be happy if folks would hack away at Darwin.
I have NetBSD running on a Quadra 800, and an SE/30. There is a port of Linux to the hardware, but NetBSD is easier to install, more mature, and, for me, easier to admin. These machines make great little servers for low end stuff (print, DNS). I tried out the Linux m68k build about a year ago but I got so many kernel panics that I quickly determined that this was not an option.
I also use Darwin/OS X a lot, but again not because I dislike Linux, but because for what it is/does it is super.
BTW, personally I like how easy it is to admin a BSD system compared to a Linux box, I like the ports system more than rpm/apt. I find the portability of the OS handy as I have a lot of weird hardware, and being able to maintain some consistency is a good thing to keep administration simple. This is largely a matter of preference.
It is not fair to assume that NetBSDers ave a grudge against that more popular system for 'getting to big for its britches.' This is not about obscurantism. We like our lovely OS for what it is, and can do, not because that some other OS is too trendy.
I use my Visor to do exactly what is intended to do, and I love it because it does it so well. I do think some games would play better on a CE thing, but I only play about an hour a week or so on my Handspring, and if I really wanted games I would get a color GameBoy.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of the article was not that the systems had defects (the article notes that the X-Box rate of failure was in line with competitors). The point was the bad customer experience people were having when they had defective units and did what they were "supposed to do" (call Microsoft).
Personally if I bought any bad console I would never call the mf'r, I would go to the store where I bought it and either demand a refund or a replacement, but that is not what MS wants you to do.
As far as NFS goes, there are free utilities (mentioned above) to make this easy to set up. Granted Apple should have included some tool to do a similar thing, but the tool does exist. If you have moral issues with using it, then dig in to the NetInfo man pages, and have fun. Do note that there is a netinfo (3) and a netinfo (8) page. When I need to mount shares I now use the Finder's 'connect to' and enter the url in this form "nfs://host.domain.net/path/to/share/" It mounts just like an SMB of AFP share, making it more Mac-like. I know a lot of people who use NFS mouting and automounting who never have seen any problems, so I think you just need to bear with learning how it works on Mac OS X.
/etc/ will be read instead of NetInfo.
As far as NIS goes, there are tutorials on setting this up (the best being How to integrate Mac OS X in an NIS environment. I have set up NIS on a 10.0.4 system with no hassles (and it survived the 10.1 update fine), so I think you just need to look into it a little more. It is not hard. We still have a Mac OS X system bound to our Sun for testing setups, and it was straightforward to set up. Setting up Mac OS X as an NIS master is a hairy (though possible), if that was what you wanted to do, I would recommend that you just use something else.
Mac OS X's UNIXness has at its core OpenSTEP, which is whhere the way of setting up both NIS and NFS comes from. OpenSTEP used to have a cool NetworkManger.app that made setting up NIS a lot better, though sadly it is gone now. It is a UNIX even if it is a bit weird compared to the rest. To make it behave more normally, you can change lookupd's lookup order to read the FFAgent first, so that all those files in
Finally as far as SMB goes, this does not seem to me to be much related to a UNIX thing, since it is a Windows protocol. As far as mounting SMB shares, it is the same as AFP or NFS - use the GUI. I don't use SMB much, but I never saw problems. I expect that if it is broken updates will be coming.
As far as ease of use goes, mounting NFS or SMB share sis really easy, and the rest is not what the typical Mac user would ever deal with. Apple has limited resources, and puts its focus on making core groups happy. I feel it is safe to say that NIS integration is not going to be high on the list.
I do agree that currently on the *NIX side others are more mature, Mac OS X's core hasn't changed a lot since OpenStep 4.2 in a lot of ways, and it certainly needs work. With Jordan Hubbard on board working to get the *NIX side in sync with FreeBSD I think it should mature nicely, and you can always contribute to Darwin if you get a bee in your bonnet, it's open.
Those are all disanalogies. Some closer analogies (I do not think that there are any that are really good), might be:
You buy a music CD make a copy of it and give it to a friend. This is the closest, but it is so close as to hardly be an analogy.
You buy a novel and photocopy it. Less close, still the same issue, copyright violation.
You buy a crappy Chrysler in '86, and then build a factory in your back yard and produce an exact duplicate Chrysler. Not as close, but closer the remarkably weak analogies you offered.
You go to McDonalds, dressed as an employee. You walk behind the counter and pretend to take orders, exactly copying the movements of your neighboring employees. Not close at all, but pretty much as good as analogy as your goofy McDonalds one.
The crux of copyright viloation is that duplicating something is illegal. Some people think that duplication is not immoral, some do not. If you are going to argue about this with an analogy, you need to make one that illustrates a moral issue by an act of copying. Perhaps you might take the license approach and say that those who copy are violating a license, so those who get upset about GPL or BSD license violations (I know I do) should be just as upset at illegal copying of software. I think that that is a better analogy, though still needing work.
Nice flame. Cracking passwords can be considered an innocent activity when it is part of a security audit. In fact password crackers are a legitimate part of many a sysadmin's tools when they need to verify that no users are using weak passwords.
The reason that Randall got burned by a felony conviction was because he was said to gain by the act. Intel testified that they believed that the specific benefit that Randal would have received would be recognition when he showed his employer a security weakness (not exploiting the system to steal IP, wreak financial havoc on the company, etc.).
No doubt poor communications and a lack of judgment were a part of this, but the severity of the punishment for this is absurd, and the degree to which Intel manipulated the legal system (they went with the police when they searched Randal's home) ideally should have gotten the case thrown out (IMHO).
Intel did push to get Schwartz behind bars, and he is really lucky that he did not do time. In this case the nature of punishment certainly does not fit the crime, and Randal certainly should have done everything in his power to rectify it.
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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=
* Support for dual display and video mirroring: Millions of colors on the built-in display and an external display at up to 1600 by 1200 pixels
* Support for a single external display: Millions of colors on a single external display at up to 1920 by 1440 pixels
You are right in that since MS email server/client architecture out of the box creates these sort of disasters, so dolts who run a crappy ass install of a crappy ass server with a crappy client with crappy ass users then you do deserve whatever you get.
But still, kids will be kids. Cracking down hard on kids does not stop kids from being kids, it just makes mean spirited adults feel better. Kids who write viruses do not deserve to go to jail, and putting them there solves nothing, it just makes adults with child-like feelings feel vindicated.
If adults write viruses it is a whole different story, but I know enough kids who were screwed over by insanely harsh penalties who could have wound up doing a lot of good for society, but instead I now work with them in jail, and hear the hate that they now have for all authority (due to stupid adults acting out on their child-like feelings).
These are not pretend people, or abstractions, these are real kids. Saying that it is okay to put a kid in jail for writing a computer program is absolutely insane.
As far as a) goes, MS email server/client architecture out of the box creates these sort of disasters. It is only with 3rd party addons / a non-default configuration that these things get fixed.
That is a serious issue that MS should be held accountable for, not some kids who notice how easy it is to exploit.
As far as the impact on businesses goes, if they foolishly choose a system that puts security and stability as priorities that are secondary to convenience they deserve to go out of business.
With respect to b), the hoodlum here is the company who designed a system so easy to exploit, not some kids who noticed this and did so. Businesses that have adopted MS solutions and as a consequence of this have to deal with the financial burden of bouncing and disinfecting their infrastructure should join in filing class action suits against MS, not encourage putting kids in jail for being kids.
I would like to see Gartner condemn the use of ICQ and ScreenSavers, recommending IRC and turning off displays instead.
I honestly don't see why people like bash so much, but being one of those zsh users, to me bash seems so lacking in useful features comparatively. zsh on OS X can be made to behave just like bash if you want that behavior. By default it is useless, but once you've set up a good .zshrc it sings. Take a look at zsh.org for more info.
Interestingly Mac OS X uses zsh for its sh emulation, and Jordan Hubbard was on the darwin lists explaining that they are planning to move to bash for sh emulation since it is more lightweight and seemed to help performance a lot for sh intensive things like configuring, and making certain software packages where lots of instances of sh were called up. I was hoping they would use FreeBSD's sh or ash or something more lightweight than bash, but bash is still better than zsh for sh emulation.
Fink is a port of the debian package management tools combined with a source based install system. By defauly many Open Source tools need a few tweaks to get them to compile on Mac OS X. Fink automated those tweaks. So you can just use apt/dselect to get software installed, of use 'fink install xxx' and have it automatically download compile and install the software (making a deb file in the process). And it does it without clobbering any of the default system (unlike GNU Darwin - grrr).
Intel's 802.11A cards do look kind of interesting, but really for a home user 11 megabits is plenty of throughput. Modem users are sucking down 56k (and Airport is aimed at folks with modems - note the AOL compatibility). Standard DSL connections peak at 1.5, and cable at its best gets 3 (but not very often in my experience). So the bottleneck isn't the wireless LAN for home users, which are who Apple is marketing this to along with K-12 who typically don't have impressive bandwidth either). If you were in a corporate environment and were using local servers I could maybe see wanting the added bandwidth, but Airport isn't trying to go there.
On the Linksys product page for the one I have:d =2 3
. ht ml
http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?gri
they have a link 'Macintosh Installation Instructions', which points to this article:
http://www.macworld.com/2000/12/01/howto/router
This article explains how to upgrade the Firmware using a Mac.
I followed the steps with my Mac, and they worked fine. Mac OS X has a tftp client that you can use, but there is no GUI.
For this to come up you need to have multiple partitions, one of which is named 'Applications.' This is not too common, but it is done.
I knew a guy who did graphic design who did this, I always though it was kind of dumb back then, since apps not running on the boot volume in Mac OS 8.1 - 9.x took a performance/VM hit. It doesn't have that impact on X, but I still don't see much benefit.
Hmmm. I have a Jornada that has mostly sat in a drawer now for two months. This is because I won a Palm V. I liked the Jornada, though it was a little too big to carry around in my pocket comfortably, but once I played with the Palm, I found that while the Palm does not have all the gimmicks that the Jornada has, it is infinitely more useful. The Palm UI is clearly years ahead of the PocketPC UI, and given MS's tendencies, I do not think that it will ever improve. Plus there are a lot more *useful* apps for the Palm. I use it for grocery lists, to dos, scheduling, contacts, and other useful things, and it excels. On the Jornada I could get these things to work, but I was always fighting it to make it work. Anyone who thinks that they will be playing a FPS on their PDA for more than a month is probably mistaken, and while I was able to impress my friends for a while with the 'gee-whiz' factor of the multimedia stuff, it is honestly pretty poor, and no substitute for a real laptop. All of the 'features' that the PocketPC touts over the Palm are impressive loking at first, but ultimately useless to me.
When I first started running X I was annoyed at the UI changes, but after a while I started to use them, and now I think that OS 9 is pretty awkward. The Finder's toolbar/shelf is really handy, and is far nicer than tabbed folders, and Column view is really handy once you get used to it. I miss labels too, you should submit feedback about that.
There is a tool called ASM if you clamor for the App Switcher in the upper righ like I do, that I use all the time. It makes things feel a lot more like OS 9.
The Dock tries to do less in 10.1 than it does in 10.0.x (menu items taking over), so maybe things are heading away from the Swiss Army Dock. I think the Dock can be fairly handy, and as it evolves I bet it will get better.
Mac OS X has two file linking items, links (hard or soft), and aliases. The first was inherited from UNIXland, the latter from Macs starting with System 7. I think that they prefer aliases (there is o GUI way to make soft links) probably because aliases are more user friendly, since you can move the original file and an alias will still resolve, and if it fails the OS will ask you to locate the original. Unfortunately, they each work a little differently, and each have their quirks when your filesystem is shared (via FTP, HTTP, AFP, SMB, etc.). The default behavior for SMB shares is to copy aliases as a file, but to follow symlinks. I think that this is probably a bug, and it should treat each as a sort of stub file. You can actually submit feedback if it bugs you.
You can register for free with ADC and file the bug at https://bugreport.apple.com/.
As far as the release date goes, I do not care so much when they released it, as much as that it was solid.
Take a look at the docs at Mozilla's site:
http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/patch-maker/
I have to say that with the Tab interface, support for the LINKS toolbar, and all of the other cool things Moz has been picking up lately, it is really becoming a brilliant application. I cringe when I am stuck using I.E. now.
I tried very hard to reproduce this but could not. A lot of folks are misunderstanding the difference between just decoding - which does happen and which is not a major security concern (you opted to download the file, after all), and decoding and executing the file (which would be bad, but which I cannot get to happen, despite a number of tries).
I have two OS X 10.1 systems. I do not use IE (mozilla is superior), so they have default prefs. I went to versiontracker, downloaded a few binhexed files and in each case it decoded the file (which is corect behavior, and not a significant security risk), but did not attempt to execute the file. On the first system I tested my user's home is an NFS export, so I tested with a local user with a local home, and I even created a new user with a local home, and in no case was I able to reproduce this. I went to my PowerBook and tested there, and I also was not able to reproduce. Something fishy is going on here. Either the report is false (which I am inclined to believe - most who are verifying this are just reporting that the file is decoded which is not a major security concern), or there are other conditions that need to be met (which I would be interested to hear).
I think you are mistaken on a few points:
Classic's transparency is a virtue, which allows for a necessary integration. It is very bad UI to have a whole runtime living in a separate window. The old Blue Box was clearly short lived for a reason, trueblue kicks it's ass in both performance, and usability.
In current Mac OS X the Genie effect can be replaced by the 'scale' effect if you want it, HD aliases can go in the dock (or you can use an Apple Menu replacement if you really want to - they exist). The Finder toolbar allows you to put whatever foders you want in it, which works far more nicely that the pop-up windows (or tabbed folders as you call them).
It is true that you do not have the option to use labels currently (or folder colors, as you called them), and I would suggest that if you miss it you give Apple feedback to that effect. I have, and I know there is a Radar bug on it. More feedback = better chance it will appear in 10.2 (or whatever the next releaase will be called).
As far as file comments go, they exist in Mac OS X, you show how little you actually tried to use the system by that comment. I am running 10.1 as my production system, I do not find that I am any less productive than I was on 9.x. After I lived with the changes to the UI, I discovered (somewhat reluctantly in places) that they are mostly improvements over OS 9. I do not run Classic often, but apps run at close enough to native speed that I have never noticed it, and benchmarks done (on xlr8yourmac) show that at worst you are typically looking at a 5% performance drop - I seriously doubt that MOL would offer better performance.
You might want to actually test the system for longer than the ten minutes or so it appears you spent with Public Beta or DP 3, or whatever you were using, so that you know what it is you are writing off.
In a way this seems worse. MS has what would be a solution that could have cut the damage this sort of worm did by a fair amount, but instead of having it installed by default, you have to go to their update web page. I realize that Windows Update is fairly easy to use (I updated my W2K box that way), but this should really be installed and enabled by default, and disabled by folks who are the 'power users,' who do not want it running.
I have been monitoring my logs, and most of the hits I get are from Cable/DSL users. I bet a lot of these people are unaware that they are even running IIS, let alone that they need to install a security patch.
I have not used W2k much (set up a test server at work, and reboot it now and then when it fails mysteriously), so I guess by default there is no automatic "Your Software needs updating" dialog that pesters you. If MS had their SW configured to do a weekly check and let users know that updates were available it would help. I know that Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X do this and it is useful for making sure systems stay current, and I wrote a few scripts that run as cron job on my Debian box at home that do apt-get update weekly, and mail me if there is a security update.
Maybe something like this is already there in W2K (though if it is it sould be surprising), and I just have never seen it, I apologize if I speak from ignorance, but if there is not, then MS needs to get on the ball. Their software is causing a lot of problems, and they need to be more active in making sure that their boxes get updated.
I do not understand what you mean.
What makes you think that Apple does not think it is great that people hack Macs and write their own software for them? I would think it is safe to assume they think it will increase the popularity of the product. While it is obvious that Apple wants software on their platform, even on the OS level, Apple did sponsor the MkLinux project, and while Apple did not work with the NetBSD team on the port per se, there were folks from Apple who did contribute. Currently the innards of OS X are open, and they would be happy if folks would hack away at Darwin.
I have NetBSD running on a Quadra 800, and an SE/30. There is a port of Linux to the hardware, but NetBSD is easier to install, more mature, and, for me, easier to admin. These machines make great little servers for low end stuff (print, DNS). I tried out the Linux m68k build about a year ago but I got so many kernel panics that I quickly determined that this was not an option.
I also use Darwin/OS X a lot, but again not because I dislike Linux, but because for what it is/does it is super.
BTW, personally I like how easy it is to admin a BSD system compared to a Linux box, I like the ports system more than rpm/apt. I find the portability of the OS handy as I have a lot of weird hardware, and being able to maintain some consistency is a good thing to keep administration simple. This is largely a matter of preference.
It is not fair to assume that NetBSDers ave a grudge against that more popular system for 'getting to big for its britches.' This is not about obscurantism. We like our lovely OS for what it is, and can do, not because that some other OS is too trendy.
I use my Visor to do exactly what is intended to do, and I love it because it does it so well. I do think some games would play better on a CE thing, but I only play about an hour a week or so on my Handspring, and if I really wanted games I would get a color GameBoy.