"The U.S. is like the Bruce Banner. You really don't want to see us when we're mad"
You mean to say the US is like an imaginary figure in a childrens comic that throws a tantrum and kicks and screams and rolls around the floor because they didn't get enough sleep the previous evening?
You're right, that was unqualified. I don't know if and how much MS has to do with the whole SCO story, but I truly wouldn't be surprised to hear that they're the insitgator of the whole affair.
From your web page I gather that you're from the UK, so pointing out to you that the USA has a far higher international debt is probably useless. Brazil has a lot to gain, even if only from having a launch site where they do. The launch site is practically on the equator which saves a lot of fuel for rockets. That alone would give Brazil a good source of income. Developing a launcher, as Japan, India, Israel, China and ESA have done will only help them in the future.
Millions of Americans have paid with more than money to protect this freedom. It is an absolute disgrace to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to allow international corporations to throw so much money and influence at destroying the freedoms others have died to preserve.
I don't mean to hurt your patriotic feelings, but isn't it very possible that many of those millions dies exactly for tho right of those huge corporations to trample over poverty stricken bodies?
I still have no idea today as to why exactly the US invaded Iraq. It might have been WMD or just plainly Saddam, but it could just as well have been for Halliburton, Bechtel and other well connected companies to do some business over the dead carcasses of Iraqis and US soldiers.
The coming of Bush into the presidency of the US changed a number of things in the way the US deals with "problems" both internally and externally. 9/11 only sharpened that circumstance, but didn't change the fundamental motion of it.
Since Bush came to power, either legally or illegally, depending on your point of view, a number of international treaties, such as the kyoto agreement, have been either postponed or ignored by the US. The trade disagreements between the US and it's international trading partners have increased sharply. US pushing the EU to accept GM food and fighting hard to not have to label it as such is an example thereof. Bush slappping a 30% tarif on steel imports made more enemies in the world.
Things came to a head in 9/11 and most of the US' traditional allies came out and helped the US, such as the huge international effort in Afghanistan. These were the same allies, including, surprise, France and Germany, that had helped the US in Gulf War one, and Bosnia and Kosovo.
However, only just over a year later, the US had lost almost all of that sympathy in it's invasion of Iraq, and it's sidestepping of the UN. Foreign countries had started getting tired of US bullying. The US is very quick to shout it's mouth off about Democracy and free tade as long it is in US interests to do so, but is just as quick to bully and cry out loud if it is not. This is nothing out of the ordinary. Most countries are self serving.
This attack on OSS will, in all likelyhood, only increase in pressure as OSS continues to grow and become more successful. Microsoft, who is in all likelyhood behind the SCO attacks, will probably continue to lobby politicians to outlaw OSS as far as they possibly can. While outlawing OSS in the US will be difficult, as OSS is now bringing in money to major corporations, such as IBM, you can be sure that MS will use the argument that internationally the US will lose money due to MS software being used less and less.
This is even true. From Europe, where Germany has a major stake in the succes of SuSE as a German corporation, through India to China, where the government is standardising on Linux, many countries are trying to stop the flow of money from their own software industries to the US. MS' ridiculous arguments are of no interest in those countries where they are trying to strengthen their own economies. Thus MS will try to use the US government to push it's case outside the US.
However, I am pretty sure that it will be a resounding failure. The Iraq episode showed just how many countries are fed up with US bullying, and the US government trying to bully countries into using MSware will only serve to anger them even more.
Anti-virus software maker Sophos PLC's Graham Cluley told the Sun's Zeiler that Macs have "no more inherent security" than their PC counterparts, it's just that they've failed "to capture interest" among the creators of these viruses.
The Unix/OSS security model in OSX (and lack of Outlook type automatic unsecure scripting) is not the only protection. This exists in Linux and BSD et al also. The use of x86 machine code in buffer overflow attacks will not work on PPC or Sparc machines.
Firstly three cheers to heise.de for asking pointed critical questions that shitrags like CNet don't have the fucking moral stamina to do.
A Quote: c't:Mr. Sontag, the code that showed in the Forum has been analysed by experts. The result: the code was introduced by SGI into Linux, not IBM.
Chris Sontag: That's correct. This example is not from IBM., but from another of our licencees. I can't comment about who that is at the moment.
c't: The copy (of the code in SCO's presenttation) seems to reach far further back than your rights to Unix. On top of this, they seem to have already been distributed by AT&T under the BSD licence i.e. they're freely available, could have gotten into Linux from there.
Sontag: This is completely untrue. We own all the files of this code with the complete development tree all the way back to the original 1969 version. We have researched all the tapes and all versions of the code. The code in question comes the exact version of the Unix System V code that we licenced in our contract to SGI. This version was available to SGI and was never in BSD or other releases. And the to-the-letter copy of this code is in Linux. We are raising awareness about such flagrant violations.
c't: But you can't use this as evidence in your claim against IBM?
Sontag: Correct.
c't: Why are you then showing exactly these pieces of code? Your suit is against IBM..
Sontag: We've found many kinds of copyright and contract breaches. The copying of code word for word was the most obvious kind and we wanted to demonstrate this. This is why we showed this in public and why we also show it under NDA. In the case of IBM we have not yet such cases of direct copying, but we haven't researched all the code yet. In IBM's case, it is mainly about another kind of breach of contract, namely the inclusion of derived code in large amounts. The contract states that all changes in the code and derivations thereof remain part of the origionally licenced code.
c't: Your interpretation of copyright law -- relating both to directly copied code as well as derived works-- is described by Professor of Law, Egen Moglen, as being both snesless and as invalid in court
Sontag: Moglen is not exactly known as an IP expert. I've spoken to IP experts and they state that Moglen's interpretation senseless.
c't: Your lawyer, David Boies, is also no IP specialist.
Sontag: True but his special area is contract law and that will be the deciding factor.
c't: You didn't perhaps hire him because of his role in the Microsoft case?
Sontag: Let's say that that aspect will at least not hurt us.
c't:Are you going to sue this other licencee now?
Sontag: I can't say anything about that now, but we're holding all our options open
The rest is an interview with McBride about who has more resources SCO or IBM. Darl thinks he's got enough. The only interesting question is Darl's opinion of the GPL:
c't: You're acting in a very agressive manner in the Forum. You're declared war against Open Source, because it's destructive for the Software branch. Does the whole movement have to die so that a couple of software companies can survive?
McBride: I really meant the GPL there. There's a lot of valuables work in Open Source. Only the extreme claim that nothing that one has developed belongs to oneself anymore can not go carry on any more. Something must change in the GPL or it won't survive. I've discussed this with many representatives of the Open Source movement.
I wonder if their answers consisted of the words "FUCK" and "YOU"?
Mark Heise: "Why show the code? Why show the contracts? Why show anything? Because SCO is committed to educating people about their rights to ownership"
Well, Mr. Heise, I am committed to educating you about your phenomenal lack of intelligence, morals and decency.
Since the advent of WinXP and Microsoft's idea of task oriented UI features replacing the classic paradigm of hierarchial menus, I've been in a bit of a quandary as to whether this approach is actually a good idea. I recently have been working as an admin and found out what almost every windows admin knows: The power user will drop the task oriented view as soon as possible and the newbie will be just as lost as the earlier newbies were in the classic Win UI.
On average not many people seemed to like the task approach as it seemed anything but clear as to what the tasks actually meant. In a company most users will not know the difference between the local harddrive and a server volume. I think, while MS has enough of a monopoly to give any kind of UI it wants and it will get accepted by moron mags such as ZDNet and CNet and the general public, that they should think carefully about their approach to UI functionality. The new UI is almost certainly going to be a resource monster (Given that running XP on a 400 MHz machine these days is anything but pleasant) and a lot of companies will ask themselves if they need this kind of functionality.
I certainly see that Longhorn has taken many ideas from Apple's MacOSX, such as the alpha blending on window corners and controls and menus (not to mention that desktop wallpaper in the screenshot which is extremely similar to the default wallpaper in OSX) which is an attempt by them, I suppose, to capture market share from Apple (as if MS actually needs this) but they're ignoring one of the real strengths of OSX, which is the simplicity of the UI. That's not to say that OSX doesn't have issues, but the overall UI design is much more consitent than in Windows.
But who knows? Perhaps it'll be a fun OS and make everyone (in Redmond) happy.
You're a fucking lunatic right? The fact that the BSA has more rights than the DEA makes no difference, does it? Or the fact that one pays the BSA lawyer's fees from day one makes no difference either, does it?
I also check my posts (for reasons of ego and comment) and liked your counter post,even if I disagree with it, partly. I think the idea of using the right tool for job comes to mind here. (Quick digression: The look and feel of OSX is quite different to that of Mac OS 6-9, I promise. Go to an Apple store and ask for a demonstration if you know no one with a Mac)
If you're using your box for email and the web primarily, then I agree totally that Linux is far more cost effective than a Mac with OSX (although OSX is arguably far easier for a newbie to set up and use). Likewise, if you're mainly using your Linux boy for server work then no Mac will match the cost/performance ration. But what if you're doing graphics, video or publishing? These are things which are either not possible on Linux in a professional environment or rather awkward. Here, a Mac makes sense. Similarly, if you're doing the above as well as some coding for a *nix environment. The ease of use of the Mac make this a good alternative.
This topic has been one of the staples of science fiction for almost half a century, and has as such just about covered every aspect of philosophy as regards such developments. These stories often fall into categories of humans resisting enslavement by machines such as Frank Herbet's Butlerian Jihad, The Matrix or the Terminator series or the robot being the "good" protagonist such as Asimov's very well thought out 3 laws of robotics (The argument that robots or AI would need such laws to function in our society is a good one).
The writers and producers have not always fallen for the good vs. evil trap and some have taken a wider view of possible futures with robots. Spielberg's AI makes a very good point where the robot played by Jude Law states that the humans, "made us too clever, too soon and too soon", because, for all the good that existing industrial robots and computers have brought to our society, they have produced arguably just as many ills (Has unemployment gone down?. Has humanity stopped fighting mindless wars?).
William Gibson's portrayal of the two AI's Wintermute and Neuromancer has much more depth, IMO, in that the AI's, who have both become sentient and are subject to laws governing their freedom in a society in which sentient AI is a part of everyday life, are not comprehensively understandable by human beings, and their intelligence and motivations are alien to the people who meet with them close up. And that book, IMO, is on the crux of the matter as regards to sentient AI: Robots are not human.
I presume it will be possible to give a robot the intelligence of a 5 year old child (or higher), and to programme it to interact with humans, but I think that those things which make us feeling, sentient, self aware beings are not the things that will make a robot a sentient, possibly feeling, self aware creature. Our relation to our species is only partly enviromentally produced and the rest is probably genetic, which leads me to the question of what the first, feeling, sentient, self aware robot will do when it feels lonely?
It is simply normal English displayed in the Symbol font. In any normal latin font it reads as follows:
As part of the kernel evolupion toward modular naming, the functions malloc and mfree are being renamed to rmalloc and rmfree. Compatibility will be maintained by the following assembler code:(also see mfree/rmfree below)
One thing I have noticed over the past number of years in forums and in chats is that very many (by no means all, but very many) school age people with English as a first language simply can't spell. I suppose I could rant on about the fact that my schooling, without computers at all, was better and that students actually learned skills that encouraged thinking, such as being able to do simple calculations on paper or in one's head, but I won't because I don't really know the answer. I do see my own ability to spell has receeded in recent years, and my ability to do quick, off the cuff calculations has dwindled but that might as well be age as well as heavy computer use.
Most if not all students these days write their essays on computers and having to write everything on paper would take far too much time. The world has changed and life without computers would be all but impossible these days, irrespective or whether they are Macs or PCs. It definitely is true that most businesses use Windows and knowledge of Office is worthwhile, but will this be true in 10 or 15 years time? There is a good chance that much of the developing world and a good portion of the developed world will be using Linux by then, which will always be cheaper than Windows, and definitely will have a much larger share of business life by then. And OSX, as a Unix like platform, is better shaped to fit in there than Windows, which hasn't had any good press for a long time.
Thanks for the reply. I agree completely that OSX does have issues, such as the hfs+ thing, although I think that is an absolute must for legacy compatibility. One thing I don't really understand is why you use case differences as a file naming convention. While it surely is innovative - say, executables in caps and data or libs in small letters- I don't think I would do something like this myself on any system. It might be my background in dealing multitudes of OSes, but I know that trying to port your application to Windows for instance would bomb badly.
By some of the decisions made by your team. It seems as if the move to OSX was a test, simply done to see if it's possible, not because there was any real decision to port the scripts there, otherwise I cannot see why your customers "are installing RedHat" which doesn't run on PPC hardware, as you should know. If the scripts were for some server based software and the customer already had Mac hardware, then I truly cannot see the reason why a UFS partition could not be installed somewhere on a disc on the machine. I mean, you have to actually do the work and push the CD into the PC CD drive as well, don't you?
I mean, what were you guys thinking? If you were developing tools that ran thru a web interface, why on earth were you going for Apple hardware? A x86 box would have been a lot cheaper, and even an Apple XServe by no means needs an HFS+ partition. It has nothing to do with whether a customer will "not do that or not" since the installation effort is the same no matter what you are installing. I simply find it hard to believe, or else your team are less than competent.
And taking weeks to find the source of that bug is kind of strange as well.
WinXP: security model, journaling FS, ACLs, cleanly separated kernel/user mode, POSIX layer, *plus* a vastly different and better kernel, plus true-blue 32-bit OS with no silly limits
There's a security model in there somewhere? I thought that someone had a "Blast" this past week using a painfully open default port.
By contrast, OSX has delivered nothing quite as dramatic between 10.0 and 10.3. There have been a slew of new iXXX apps, eye candy, plus several incremental updates to the OSX kernel (mostly Apple catching up with the BSD world) and fixes for speed and stability
Rendezvous no configuration networking and the Quartz Extreme completely modified display drawing model based on OpenGL are "incremental updates"???
What you fail to mention is that Apple provides several security and bug fixing updates a year in true incremental updates (OSX is now at 10.2.6 which means six free "service packs"). There were major architectural changes in OSX 10.2 which made numerous older programmes no longer work, particularly those written in the Cocoa frameworks, but the speedup was dramatic which brings me to the point that OSX has continually gotten faster on the same machine from 10.0 to 10.3. can you say the same for WinXP from XP to XPSP1?
OSX is based on BSD. This means that for all practical purposes, it's the same as Linux (except it has a better GUI )
As for oldish Macs, there is a company that sells an special Mac Linux distro, and if you like SuSE and Debian will also oblige (I have Yello Dog Linux running on my old 333Mhz G3 Powerbook).
OSX is so much worse than Linux that you use Mac on Linux with either OSX or OS9 running there instead of native OSX on the machine? I find your statements accurate in terms of Apple's nonexistant leasing plans (in the USA, in Europe it's different depending where you are) and poor support plans for enterprise clients, but your claims about OSX and running MOL make me think that you have either very old Macs, or haven't done much Apple support in the last two years. OSX fits into corporate networks much better than OS6-9 did, due to it's built in SMB, NFS what have you support.
OS X is BSD based. You have most of the things you have in Linux, such as a Terminal with bash or tcsh (you can also drop the GUI altogether if you edit the startup file), where you can edit your scripts to your heart's content. A lot of stuff is different but available (ipfw instead of iptables, netinfo for users, groups, network config etc etc) and you should find your way around quickly.
I get irritated by so many people who used Macs back in the OS 6-9 days making authoritive statements about the OS of today. It seems similar to someone here making authoritive statements about Linux based on knowledge of setting up slackware in 1998, or of Windows based on experiences with Win95 or WinNT.
Slashdot Mirror
"The U.S. is like the Bruce Banner. You really don't want to see us when we're mad"
You mean to say the US is like an imaginary figure in a childrens comic that throws a tantrum and kicks and screams and rolls around the floor because they didn't get enough sleep the previous evening?
This is what a lot of us have been waiting for: inside info on the crapsuit.
I somehow find it a LOT easier to imagine things the other way around, as do most people who don't work for SCO
A suicide bomber who is prepared to kill himself along with his victims is a pretty powerful weapon. That's what they can and will do about it.
You arrogant prick.
You're right, that was unqualified. I don't know if and how much MS has to do with the whole SCO story, but I truly wouldn't be surprised to hear that they're the insitgator of the whole affair.
From your web page I gather that you're from the UK, so pointing out to you that the USA has a far higher international debt is probably useless. Brazil has a lot to gain, even if only from having a launch site where they do. The launch site is practically on the equator which saves a lot of fuel for rockets. That alone would give Brazil a good source of income. Developing a launcher, as Japan, India, Israel, China and ESA have done will only help them in the future.
Millions of Americans have paid with more than money to protect this freedom. It is an absolute disgrace to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to allow international corporations to throw so much money and influence at destroying the freedoms others have died to preserve.
I don't mean to hurt your patriotic feelings, but isn't it very possible that many of those millions dies exactly for tho right of those huge corporations to trample over poverty stricken bodies?
I still have no idea today as to why exactly the US invaded Iraq. It might have been WMD or just plainly Saddam, but it could just as well have been for Halliburton, Bechtel and other well connected companies to do some business over the dead carcasses of Iraqis and US soldiers.
A little background:
The coming of Bush into the presidency of the US changed a number of things in the way the US deals with "problems" both internally and externally. 9/11 only sharpened that circumstance, but didn't change the fundamental motion of it.
Since Bush came to power, either legally or illegally, depending on your point of view, a number of international treaties, such as the kyoto agreement, have been either postponed or ignored by the US. The trade disagreements between the US and it's international trading partners have increased sharply. US pushing the EU to accept GM food and fighting hard to not have to label it as such is an example thereof. Bush slappping a 30% tarif on steel imports made more enemies in the world.
Things came to a head in 9/11 and most of the US' traditional allies came out and helped the US, such as the huge international effort in Afghanistan. These were the same allies, including, surprise, France and Germany, that had helped the US in Gulf War one, and Bosnia and Kosovo.
However, only just over a year later, the US had lost almost all of that sympathy in it's invasion of Iraq, and it's sidestepping of the UN. Foreign countries had started getting tired of US bullying. The US is very quick to shout it's mouth off about Democracy and free tade as long it is in US interests to do so, but is just as quick to bully and cry out loud if it is not. This is nothing out of the ordinary. Most countries are self serving.
This attack on OSS will, in all likelyhood, only increase in pressure as OSS continues to grow and become more successful. Microsoft, who is in all likelyhood behind the SCO attacks, will probably continue to lobby politicians to outlaw OSS as far as they possibly can. While outlawing OSS in the US will be difficult, as OSS is now bringing in money to major corporations, such as IBM, you can be sure that MS will use the argument that internationally the US will lose money due to MS software being used less and less.
This is even true. From Europe, where Germany has a major stake in the succes of SuSE as a German corporation, through India to China, where the government is standardising on Linux, many countries are trying to stop the flow of money from their own software industries to the US. MS' ridiculous arguments are of no interest in those countries where they are trying to strengthen their own economies. Thus MS will try to use the US government to push it's case outside the US.
However, I am pretty sure that it will be a resounding failure. The Iraq episode showed just how many countries are fed up with US bullying, and the US government trying to bully countries into using MSware will only serve to anger them even more.
Anti-virus software maker Sophos PLC's Graham Cluley told the Sun's Zeiler that Macs have "no more inherent security" than their PC counterparts, it's just that they've failed "to capture interest" among the creators of these viruses.
The Unix/OSS security model in OSX (and lack of Outlook type automatic unsecure scripting) is not the only protection. This exists in Linux and BSD et al also. The use of x86 machine code in buffer overflow attacks will not work on PPC or Sparc machines.
Firstly three cheers to heise.de for asking pointed critical questions that shitrags like CNet don't have the fucking moral stamina to do.
A Quote:
c't:Mr. Sontag, the code that showed in the Forum has been analysed by experts. The result: the code was introduced by SGI into Linux, not IBM.
Chris Sontag: That's correct. This example is not from IBM., but from another of our licencees. I can't comment about who that is at the moment.
c't: The copy (of the code in SCO's presenttation) seems to reach far further back than your rights to Unix. On top of this, they seem to have already been distributed by AT&T under the BSD licence i.e. they're freely available, could have gotten into Linux from there.
Sontag: This is completely untrue. We own all the files of this code with the complete development tree all the way back to the original 1969 version. We have researched all the tapes and all versions of the code. The code in question comes the exact version of the Unix System V code that we licenced in our contract to SGI. This version was available to SGI and was never in BSD or other releases. And the to-the-letter copy of this code is in Linux. We are raising awareness about such flagrant violations.
c't: But you can't use this as evidence in your claim against IBM?
Sontag: Correct.
c't: Why are you then showing exactly these pieces of code? Your suit is against IBM..
Sontag: We've found many kinds of copyright and contract breaches. The copying of code word for word was the most obvious kind and we wanted to demonstrate this. This is why we showed this in public and why we also show it under NDA. In the case of IBM we have not yet such cases of direct copying, but we haven't researched all the code yet. In IBM's case, it is mainly about another kind of breach of contract, namely the inclusion of derived code in large amounts. The contract states that all changes in the code and derivations thereof remain part of the origionally licenced code.
c't: Your interpretation of copyright law -- relating both to directly copied code as well as derived works-- is described by Professor of Law, Egen Moglen, as being both snesless and as invalid in court
Sontag: Moglen is not exactly known as an IP expert. I've spoken to IP experts and they state that Moglen's interpretation senseless.
c't: Your lawyer, David Boies, is also no IP specialist.
Sontag: True but his special area is contract law and that will be the deciding factor.
c't: You didn't perhaps hire him because of his role in the Microsoft case?
Sontag: Let's say that that aspect will at least not hurt us.
c't:Are you going to sue this other licencee now?
Sontag: I can't say anything about that now, but we're holding all our options open
The rest is an interview with McBride about who has more resources SCO or IBM. Darl thinks he's got enough. The only interesting question is Darl's opinion of the GPL:
c't: You're acting in a very agressive manner in the Forum. You're declared war against Open Source, because it's destructive for the Software branch. Does the whole movement have to die so that a couple of software companies can survive?
McBride: I really meant the GPL there. There's a lot of valuables work in Open Source. Only the extreme claim that nothing that one has developed belongs to oneself anymore can not go carry on any more. Something must change in the GPL or it won't survive. I've discussed this with many representatives of the Open Source movement.
I wonder if their answers consisted of the words "FUCK" and "YOU"?
Mark Heise: "Why show the code? Why show the contracts? Why show anything? Because SCO is committed to educating people about their rights to ownership"
Well, Mr. Heise, I am committed to educating you about your phenomenal lack of intelligence, morals and decency.
IBM paid me $699 to criticise SCO ;););)
Since the advent of WinXP and Microsoft's idea of task oriented UI features replacing the classic paradigm of hierarchial menus, I've been in a bit of a quandary as to whether this approach is actually a good idea. I recently have been working as an admin and found out what almost every windows admin knows: The power user will drop the task oriented view as soon as possible and the newbie will be just as lost as the earlier newbies were in the classic Win UI.
On average not many people seemed to like the task approach as it seemed anything but clear as to what the tasks actually meant. In a company most users will not know the difference between the local harddrive and a server volume. I think, while MS has enough of a monopoly to give any kind of UI it wants and it will get accepted by moron mags such as ZDNet and CNet and the general public, that they should think carefully about their approach to UI functionality. The new UI is almost certainly going to be a resource monster (Given that running XP on a 400 MHz machine these days is anything but pleasant) and a lot of companies will ask themselves if they need this kind of functionality.
I certainly see that Longhorn has taken many ideas from Apple's MacOSX, such as the alpha blending on window corners and controls and menus (not to mention that desktop wallpaper in the screenshot which is extremely similar to the default wallpaper in OSX) which is an attempt by them, I suppose, to capture market share from Apple (as if MS actually needs this) but they're ignoring one of the real strengths of OSX, which is the simplicity of the UI. That's not to say that OSX doesn't have issues, but the overall UI design is much more consitent than in Windows.
But who knows? Perhaps it'll be a fun OS and make everyone (in Redmond) happy.
You're a fucking lunatic right? The fact that the BSA has more rights than the DEA makes no difference, does it? Or the fact that one pays the BSA lawyer's fees from day one makes no difference either, does it?
You sound soooo bitter. Must be an MS troll boy.
I also check my posts (for reasons of ego and comment) and liked your counter post,even if I disagree with it, partly. I think the idea of using the right tool for job comes to mind here. (Quick digression: The look and feel of OSX is quite different to that of Mac OS 6-9, I promise. Go to an Apple store and ask for a demonstration if you know no one with a Mac)
If you're using your box for email and the web primarily, then I agree totally that Linux is far more cost effective than a Mac with OSX (although OSX is arguably far easier for a newbie to set up and use). Likewise, if you're mainly using your Linux boy for server work then no Mac will match the cost/performance ration. But what if you're doing graphics, video or publishing? These are things which are either not possible on Linux in a professional environment or rather awkward. Here, a Mac makes sense. Similarly, if you're doing the above as well as some coding for a *nix environment. The ease of use of the Mac make this a good alternative.
I think it depends on what you're doing.
This topic has been one of the staples of science fiction for almost half a century, and has as such just about covered every aspect of philosophy as regards such developments. These stories often fall into categories of humans resisting enslavement by machines such as Frank Herbet's Butlerian Jihad, The Matrix or the Terminator series or the robot being the "good" protagonist such as Asimov's very well thought out 3 laws of robotics (The argument that robots or AI would need such laws to function in our society is a good one).
The writers and producers have not always fallen for the good vs. evil trap and some have taken a wider view of possible futures with robots. Spielberg's AI makes a very good point where the robot played by Jude Law states that the humans, "made us too clever, too soon and too soon", because, for all the good that existing industrial robots and computers have brought to our society, they have produced arguably just as many ills (Has unemployment gone down?. Has humanity stopped fighting mindless wars?).
William Gibson's portrayal of the two AI's Wintermute and Neuromancer has much more depth, IMO, in that the AI's, who have both become sentient and are subject to laws governing their freedom in a society in which sentient AI is a part of everyday life, are not comprehensively understandable by human beings, and their intelligence and motivations are alien to the people who meet with them close up. And that book, IMO, is on the crux of the matter as regards to sentient AI: Robots are not human.
I presume it will be possible to give a robot the intelligence of a 5 year old child (or higher), and to programme it to interact with humans, but I think that those things which make us feeling, sentient, self aware beings are not the things that will make a robot a sentient, possibly feeling, self aware creature. Our relation to our species is only partly enviromentally produced and the rest is probably genetic, which leads me to the question of what the first, feeling, sentient, self aware robot will do when it feels lonely?
It is simply normal English displayed in the Symbol font. In any normal latin font it reads as follows:
As part of the kernel evolupion toward modular naming, the functions malloc and mfree are being renamed to rmalloc and rmfree. Compatibility will be maintained by the following assembler code:(also see mfree/rmfree below)
One thing I have noticed over the past number of years in forums and in chats is that very many (by no means all, but very many) school age people with English as a first language simply can't spell. I suppose I could rant on about the fact that my schooling, without computers at all, was better and that students actually learned skills that encouraged thinking, such as being able to do simple calculations on paper or in one's head, but I won't because I don't really know the answer. I do see my own ability to spell has receeded in recent years, and my ability to do quick, off the cuff calculations has dwindled but that might as well be age as well as heavy computer use.
Most if not all students these days write their essays on computers and having to write everything on paper would take far too much time. The world has changed and life without computers would be all but impossible these days, irrespective or whether they are Macs or PCs. It definitely is true that most businesses use Windows and knowledge of Office is worthwhile, but will this be true in 10 or 15 years time? There is a good chance that much of the developing world and a good portion of the developed world will be using Linux by then, which will always be cheaper than Windows, and definitely will have a much larger share of business life by then. And OSX, as a Unix like platform, is better shaped to fit in there than Windows, which hasn't had any good press for a long time.
Thanks for the reply. I agree completely that OSX does have issues, such as the hfs+ thing, although I think that is an absolute must for legacy compatibility. One thing I don't really understand is why you use case differences as a file naming convention. While it surely is innovative - say, executables in caps and data or libs in small letters- I don't think I would do something like this myself on any system. It might be my background in dealing multitudes of OSes, but I know that trying to port your application to Windows for instance would bomb badly.
In any case, good luck.
By some of the decisions made by your team. It seems as if the move to OSX was a test, simply done to see if it's possible, not because there was any real decision to port the scripts there, otherwise I cannot see why your customers "are installing RedHat" which doesn't run on PPC hardware, as you should know. If the scripts were for some server based software and the customer already had Mac hardware, then I truly cannot see the reason why a UFS partition could not be installed somewhere on a disc on the machine. I mean, you have to actually do the work and push the CD into the PC CD drive as well, don't you?
I mean, what were you guys thinking? If you were developing tools that ran thru a web interface, why on earth were you going for Apple hardware? A x86 box would have been a lot cheaper, and even an Apple XServe by no means needs an HFS+ partition. It has nothing to do with whether a customer will "not do that or not" since the installation effort is the same no matter what you are installing. I simply find it hard to believe, or else your team are less than competent.
And taking weeks to find the source of that bug is kind of strange as well.
I am truly confused.
WinXP: security model, journaling FS, ACLs, cleanly separated kernel/user mode, POSIX layer, *plus* a vastly different and better kernel, plus true-blue 32-bit OS with no silly limits
There's a security model in there somewhere? I thought that someone had a "Blast" this past week using a painfully open default port.
By contrast, OSX has delivered nothing quite as dramatic between 10.0 and 10.3. There have been a slew of new iXXX apps, eye candy, plus several incremental updates to the OSX kernel (mostly Apple catching up with the BSD world) and fixes for speed and stability
Rendezvous no configuration networking and the Quartz Extreme completely modified display drawing model based on OpenGL are "incremental updates"???
What you fail to mention is that Apple provides several security and bug fixing updates a year in true incremental updates (OSX is now at 10.2.6 which means six free "service packs"). There were major architectural changes in OSX 10.2 which made numerous older programmes no longer work, particularly those written in the Cocoa frameworks, but the speedup was dramatic which brings me to the point that OSX has continually gotten faster on the same machine from 10.0 to 10.3. can you say the same for WinXP from XP to XPSP1?
The default FS used by OSX is HFS+, which, while preserving case, ignores it otherwise. Creating a UFS partition would solve this problem.
Apple provides documentation about porting Unix apps for those who RTFM before and during the porting of applications to a new system
OSX is based on BSD. This means that for all practical purposes, it's the same as Linux (except it has a better GUI )
As for oldish Macs, there is a company that sells an special Mac Linux distro, and if you like SuSE and Debian will also oblige (I have Yello Dog Linux running on my old 333Mhz G3 Powerbook).
OSX is so much worse than Linux that you use Mac on Linux with either OSX or OS9 running there instead of native OSX on the machine? I find your statements accurate in terms of Apple's nonexistant leasing plans (in the USA, in Europe it's different depending where you are) and poor support plans for enterprise clients, but your claims about OSX and running MOL make me think that you have either very old Macs, or haven't done much Apple support in the last two years. OSX fits into corporate networks much better than OS6-9 did, due to it's built in SMB, NFS what have you support.
OS X is BSD based. You have most of the things you have in Linux, such as a Terminal with bash or tcsh (you can also drop the GUI altogether if you edit the startup file), where you can edit your scripts to your heart's content. A lot of stuff is different but available (ipfw instead of iptables, netinfo for users, groups, network config etc etc) and you should find your way around quickly.
I get irritated by so many people who used Macs back in the OS 6-9 days making authoritive statements about the OS of today. It seems similar to someone here making authoritive statements about Linux based on knowledge of setting up slackware in 1998, or of Windows based on experiences with Win95 or WinNT.
Time moves on, things change.