Man, that bugged me too. What could possibly be 'open source' about old usenet posts? If Google 'open sources' them, will I be able to modify an old post for my own use, so long as I release my modifications?
If they want to release them, let them do so. If Google acquired the only archive of old posts, fine. If nobody else bothered to archive them, then they've got no right to complain about the (likely temporary) loss of the service.
I didn't mean it as a personal attack, but honestly, can you remember a slashdot story involving a for-profit company supporting Free or Open software to which no "evil monopolist corporations only want to rape and pillage our resources!" sort of posts were made? They get old really quick.
I didn't mean to attack you, but do re-read your original post. Can you see how it might be interpreted as assuming that a for-profit company could never respect Free or Open software?
Just a quick question - have you ever had any interaction with, or have you witnessed interaction between Apple and Free developers? Do you work with any of the library of code that Apple has given back to projects like BSD, Apache, egcs, and such? Which of the mailing lists are you on?
Or did you just assume that Apple must be the enemy of Free software?
...of OSX? I doubt that Apple will feel any need to port the OSX GUI to Linux, but a few hackers and a few gallons of caffeine might be enough to bring over the new GUI from the darkside.
There are already themes for most of the major window managers which present an aqua-like interface. If you want other aqua elements, like the swooping-minimize effect and the magnifying dock, you'll have to code them yourself.
Please understand, though, that aqua is nowhere near the most important feature of the OS X environment, at least, IMO. The massively object-oriented Cocoa APIs, the slick and intuitive Interface Builder and Project Builder (a very nice front-end to GCC) are the best things Apple got from NeXT, and developing on OS X is like cocaine - try it once, and you'll spend the rest of your life trying to recreate the experience:)
/private/etc vs./etc - this one is notable because most of the stuff in/private/etc is not used. Network settings, user authentication, etc. are stored in the NeXT-style NetInfo database./etc is still accessable as a symlink to/private/etc.
There are a few other differences, and/usr,/usr/local,/usr/lib,/dev,/bin, and all of the other canonical Unix directories are still around for compatibility with BSD utilities and daemons. Many of them are symlinks to other places, though, and users won't see the "Unixy" directories from the finder: only from the command line.
If you've used SunOS, you'll know that Linux is very BSD - at least, the command-line utilities are. I much prefer Linux (or MacOS X, or *BSD) to SunOS for this reason. Your statement is correct - OS X and BSD are indistinguishable from the command line, and so is Linux.
Insofar as MacOS X for x86 goes, I can't even consider it, because while it may exist somewhere in the catacombs beneath the Cupertino campus, There's no way it'll get out alive with Steve Jobs around. Good idea, bad idea... it's tragically irrelevant. With Steve at the helm, it's the way things are. Mac users have had to deal with Steve so often that we're almost jaded to the neat toys (very neat - why hadn't someone thought of the auto-xover ethernet before?) and resigned to the debatable decisions and brushed-steel interfaces.
Linux and MacOS X are not really the same sort of thing. "Unix-like" is not just an item on a checklist. Linux is very nearly a true Unix (I'll let the pedants debate this one), while MacOS X shares more with NeXTSTEP and OpenSTEP - directory structure, NetInfo, display(postscript, PDF), et cetera.
While Linux is a nearly-universal kernel which runs near-flawlessly on many different systems, MacOS X is strictly a workstation for Macs. Linux has no problems running my Sparc 5 and my AMD K6 - nearly all of the services I run on each are source-compatible between the two - and is a proven server operating system. My department deploys no less than 5 Linux servers (Oracle and Apache), and they requre little maintenance - just a rack to live in. OS X is a very smooth desktop operating system, and that is in fact what I use at home and at work. While Linux can be used as a workstation and OS X as a server, for many reasons they are not comparable:
cost (free vs. ~$120)
hardware
many platforms, and from a few megabytes of RAM on a 386 to multiple gigabytes on sun4u
One platform - late Moto PPC, and no less than 128Mb RAM
goal
from single-floppy routers to multiprocessor servers to desktop game and work machines
simple, stable, powerful desktop operating system
The only reason OS X might tread on Linux's toes is the fact that it does have Unixish services and such. You can run Apache, sshd, proftpd, bind, innd, and other services from MacOS X. But that is not its focus.
The only reason Linux might tread on OS X's toes is that Linux can be used as a power-user's desktop operating system. But in my opinion, that is not its forte - and shouldn't be its focus.
Did you ever use some of the Mac clones that used to exist? My gawd! The PowerComputing PowerBase had to be one of the worst pieces of crap ever built!
Hey now - the PowerComputing machines ruled. Faster than Apple's computers of the same time, and dead reliable. The only thing that held the PowerBase back was the PPC 603 - my old PowerBase 240, sold long ago to my Mom, still kicks serious arse.
But it wasn't Slashdot, that was a quote from the submitter. That's why it's in italics.
All the same, I like Slack. I run SuSE on my desk because I like the toys, and I run Slack on my servers where the only toys I want are the ones I install myself.
By the way,/. needs a script to filter out posts with screens of empty lines in them. Some jerks can be so annoying.
Do yourself a favor and browse with a hard threshold of 1. I started a few months ago, rather hesitantly because of the occasional worthy AC post. I haven't seen any lame trolls since, and every once in a while I crank it down to -1 to see why I did it in the first place.
The only time I have to see that sh*t anymore is when I mod or metamod.
The free speech argument came up, IIRC, during the junk fax trials. Basically:
Commercial solicitations are not protected speech
The government may not restrict your right to freedom of expression, but you may not force anyone to listen to you. Furthermore, you may not force other people to pay to read/hear your views without their approval.
The only point spammers are making is "I am an inconsiderate bastard, and the cost of my advertising campaign will be yours entirely". They sure get the point across, but for the reasons outlined above, it's not protected speech under the first amendment.
woohoo, that's just hilarious. You're truly a paragon of wit. If it weren't for the fact that, as near as anyone can tell, Apple is not suing, and that this story never really existed to begin with, your little story might be relevant.
But you're not going to let silly facts stop you, right? Go get that big nasty company!
Calm down - microsoft (so far as I know) isn't planning to price windows at $1k. All that's happened is a very pretentious, very simple man has made noises on a website - nothing more. Don't give him the validation he so richly doesn't deserve.
Besides, there's no reason you couldn't compile the GNU tools yourself.
Kudos to Apple for setting the default shell to tcsh, too - and aliasing ll to ls -l by default.
Nice sentiment, but I don't think Apple is trying to make Unix appear to be a security hazard - after all, they're transitioning to a Unixlike OS in 8 days...
Of course, if someone came out with a trojan that was just a bit of code and a makefile, anything from BeOS to NeXTStep could be a potential host. Has anything like that been spread before?
I would have preferred that some of the claims be backed up. e.g., "As you may know, TCP/IP (the Internet protocol family) is the best networking protocol, and is native to Unix.". Huh? Who decided that it was the best protocol? Am I to presume that it is the best protocol for every network? Likewise, I must not have heard that "Generally, Unix-like systems have a reputation of being insecure."
Seems to me like FUD fighting FUD - if the facts are on your side, why not publish them?
The services menu survives in MacOS X. In fact, so does Objective C, Project Builder, Mach, and many other NeXTisms which kinda makes you wonder if Apple bought NeXT - or if it was the other way around...
First off, it's too bad that your (self declared) biggotry does not allow you to read posts for what they are - it's quite clear that the original poster is not "offended that Apple reviewers review Apple products," it's that they never say anything bad about them.
Ah, but the original poster stated that PC magazines will review systems from different vendors, choosing the best from the ones available. If your job is to review Macintosh system hardware, of course you're going to do reviews of Apple products, pretty much exclusively. That's not even at issue - the way it was stated made it seem like the poster was faulting them for not reviewing other vendors' products by his comparison to PC magazines. OT: the bigot thing is a joke. Don't take it seriously.
I tend to follow this stuff too, and I have yet to see any Mac reviews give anything less than 5 STARS ***** A MUST BUY. It must happen, but the vast majority that I see are sycophantic brown-nosings.
The only explaination I can think of, then is that your exposure to Mac media is via ZDNet (Macworld). Macworld went, over the course of a few years, from an objective and informative magazine, to a review rag, to, as you say, sycophantic brown-nosings - I let my subscription expire; even their reviews have seriously gone downhill. The remainder of the Mac media (or at least the parts I read) will put Apple in its place where necessary. Besides the things I mentioned in my previous post, MacAddict literally bitched out Apple for refusing to let them distribute QuickTime on The Disc, for setting MSIE and MSOE as default internet apps, for the G4 upgrade block incident, and others. DKE slams the gumdrop Aqua interface on MacKiDo. Read MacAddict. Read Stepwise (a group of Rhapsody developers). But please, don't think ZDNet's Macworld is representative of the views of Mac users - it's most definitely not.
Look into a PC magazine, and you see articles discussing the comparative strengths and weaknesses of a number of systems from a number of manufacturers; clear winners and losers emerge. By contrast, any Apple reviewer is ideologically constrained to say good things about any hardware out of Cupertino that does'nt offer danger to life and limb.
First off, I'm sorry that it offends you that Apple reviewers review Apple products, though I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Second, your implication that those who review Apple products have only good things to say about them indicates that you've not read any of the reviews you refer to. If you had, you'd know that Apple users have no problems with pointing out flaws in Apple products:
3 PCI slot towers
puck mice and tiny keyboards
braindead install utilities for Rhapsody
If you'd bothered to read Apple reviews before making your generalization about the reviewers, you might not have misspoken.
It suprises me that a company that parades its 'UI' so much that they appear to not offer a sufficient API for their developers to build applications that are consistent.
Apple does provide APIs for standard file services. The new one is Navigation Services, and the old (modal) one still works for backwards compatibility. If an developer decides to put a custom open/save interface in their application, how is that the OS vendor's fault?
The network stack sucks, and won't talk to anything other than other Macs on a LAN without glitchy 3rd party support. Until OS X hits the streets you sure wouldn't want to use one as a server, and even OS X has to rely upon FreeBSD's inovations.
er... I'm sorry that Mac hurt you as a child. Still, that's no excuse for not doing your homework. MacOS' network stack (the one that sucks so hard) wasn't written by Apple - I guess you could call that "glitchy 3rd party support". It's Mentat's Portable Streams, and if you think it sucks, you might want to find other OSes that use it so you can avoid it. From Mentat's homepage:
MPS is the native STREAMS on Apple Mac OS, Novell NetWare, Wind River VxWorks, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, IBM AIX, Compaq Tru64 UNIX, and other many leading computer and embedded operating systems.
Tragically, OS X will not use MPS, so you may be forced to concede that MacOS networking doesn't suck...
The Apple is again back to its old tricks, namely copying Microsoft's innovations. First Microsoft announces that Windows and IE are inseparable, and what you know, Apple follows their lead.
Ridiculous!
Tell me - how long have you thought that MacOS X's BSD layer is a web browser?
Classic runs regular ol' MacOS 9 in a little box tucked away in a corner Like WINE
Not quite. More like VMWare. The Classic environment is an actual instance of OS 9 that boots as an ordinary process in OS X. It basically is OS 9. Just like VMWare is WinXX running as a process under Linux, with its own little microcosm.
Carbon is the MacOS 9 API with the old cruft removed. Like WineLib
No again. Carbon is a subset of the OS 9 API; anything written to Carbon (and only Carbon; no Classic Toolbox calls) will run under both OS 9 and OS X. WineLib, if I understand correctly, is a reverse-engineered version of the WinXX APIs, in theory, anything written to a WinXX API shouldn't know that its return isn't coming from Win.
Steve Jobs' annual salary from Apple is $1. No more. Granted, he probably makes quite a bit from Pixar and Apple stock, but his annual paycheck from Apple is still $1.
Example 3. Access to stored numbers. I can jump to names in the directory by pushing the "smart button" then the alpha digit on the keypad till I get to the "N's" for example. Or I can just press the up/down buttons till I get there. The Nokia has just up down options.
Not true. On a Nokia, hit up or down once to enter the number listing, then hit a number to narrow it down: hit 3 for D, hit it again for E, once more for F.
Slashdot Mirror
If they want to release them, let them do so. If Google acquired the only archive of old posts, fine. If nobody else bothered to archive them, then they've got no right to complain about the (likely temporary) loss of the service.
I didn't mean it as a personal attack, but honestly, can you remember a slashdot story involving a for-profit company supporting Free or Open software to which no "evil monopolist corporations only want to rape and pillage our resources!" sort of posts were made? They get old really quick.
I didn't mean to attack you, but do re-read your original post. Can you see how it might be interpreted as assuming that a for-profit company could never respect Free or Open software?
Or did you just assume that Apple must be the enemy of Free software?
Please understand, though, that aqua is nowhere near the most important feature of the OS X environment, at least, IMO. The massively object-oriented Cocoa APIs, the slick and intuitive Interface Builder and Project Builder (a very nice front-end to GCC) are the best things Apple got from NeXT, and developing on OS X is like cocaine - try it once, and you'll spend the rest of your life trying to recreate the experience :)
- /System/Library vs.
/lib
- /Library vs.
/usr/lib
- /Users/username/Library vs.
/usr/local/lib
- /Users vs.
/home (or /usr/home)
- /private/etc vs.
/etc - this one is notable because most of the stuff in /private/etc is not used. Network settings, user authentication, etc. are stored in the NeXT-style NetInfo database. /etc is still accessable as a symlink to /private/etc.
- /Users/username/Library/Preferences vs.
/home/username/.*
There are a few other differences, andInsofar as MacOS X for x86 goes, I can't even consider it, because while it may exist somewhere in the catacombs beneath the Cupertino campus, There's no way it'll get out alive with Steve Jobs around. Good idea, bad idea... it's tragically irrelevant. With Steve at the helm, it's the way things are. Mac users have had to deal with Steve so often that we're almost jaded to the neat toys (very neat - why hadn't someone thought of the auto-xover ethernet before?) and resigned to the debatable decisions and brushed-steel interfaces.
While Linux is a nearly-universal kernel which runs near-flawlessly on many different systems, MacOS X is strictly a workstation for Macs. Linux has no problems running my Sparc 5 and my AMD K6 - nearly all of the services I run on each are source-compatible between the two - and is a proven server operating system. My department deploys no less than 5 Linux servers (Oracle and Apache), and they requre little maintenance - just a rack to live in. OS X is a very smooth desktop operating system, and that is in fact what I use at home and at work. While Linux can be used as a workstation and OS X as a server, for many reasons they are not comparable:
The only reason OS X might tread on Linux's toes is the fact that it does have Unixish services and such. You can run Apache, sshd, proftpd, bind, innd, and other services from MacOS X. But that is not its focus.
The only reason Linux might tread on OS X's toes is that Linux can be used as a power-user's desktop operating system. But in my opinion, that is not its forte - and shouldn't be its focus.
The Umax machines, though...
All the same, I like Slack. I run SuSE on my desk because I like the toys, and I run Slack on my servers where the only toys I want are the ones I install myself.
The only time I have to see that sh*t anymore is when I mod or metamod.
The only point spammers are making is "I am an inconsiderate bastard, and the cost of my advertising campaign will be yours entirely". They sure get the point across, but for the reasons outlined above, it's not protected speech under the first amendment.
woohoo, that's just hilarious. You're truly a paragon of wit. If it weren't for the fact that, as near as anyone can tell, Apple is not suing, and that this story never really existed to begin with, your little story might be relevant.
But you're not going to let silly facts stop you, right? Go get that big nasty company!
Calm down - microsoft (so far as I know) isn't planning to price windows at $1k. All that's happened is a very pretentious, very simple man has made noises on a website - nothing more. Don't give him the validation he so richly doesn't deserve.
Besides, there's no reason you couldn't compile the GNU tools yourself.
Kudos to Apple for setting the default shell to tcsh, too - and aliasing ll to ls -l by default.
Of course, if someone came out with a trojan that was just a bit of code and a makefile, anything from BeOS to NeXTStep could be a potential host. Has anything like that been spread before?
Seems to me like FUD fighting FUD - if the facts are on your side, why not publish them?
The services menu survives in MacOS X. In fact, so does Objective C, Project Builder, Mach, and many other NeXTisms which kinda makes you wonder if Apple bought NeXT - or if it was the other way around...
- 3 PCI slot towers
- puck mice and tiny keyboards
- braindead install utilities for Rhapsody
If you'd bothered to read Apple reviews before making your generalization about the reviewers, you might not have misspoken.Steve Jobs' annual salary from Apple is $1. No more. Granted, he probably makes quite a bit from Pixar and Apple stock, but his annual paycheck from Apple is still $1.