Acually application load time is somewhat relevant in demonstrating the effects of, NOT the CPU, but rather, the overall I/O susbsystems architecture. Same for booting.
What prompted me to do the search is that i know there had to be some solution out there for macs, because all Apple stores' cashier terminals are iMacs linked to a barcode *and* digital-credit-card processors. Cool huh?:)
Well okay, fair enuff. More specifics of things i can do EASILY with MacOSX and which I can't do on Linux:
laptops laptops laptops. Sure you can get linux workin quite well on a laptop. But OS X makes it dreamy: Check out OS X'S "network" control panel. It's hard to describe in words but it basically gives you great flexibility in switching between connectivity environments. You can define locations for all of OS X. But forget those for now. Stick to the automatic Location. the default one. No matter which connectivity is available at any given time, OS X will detect and use it: ethernet port, wireless 802.11b, bluetooth, modem, Infrared port. All those network ports are already pre-configured with priorities. You can define your own. In the end, it's beautiful: you're at work, connected via your ethernet port. you're ready to go home. close the laptop's lid. the laptop goes to sleep. you arrive home where you have an encrypted 802.11b network whose SSID is not being broadcast. you open your laptop's lid, OS X finds the wireless signal and associated authentication credentials based on settings, makes a DHCP request to your router, and bickity-bam within 5 seconds your email starts downloading in Mail.app. This all may sound trivial and stupid, but linux doesn't quite give you that on a laptop just yet. You'd need to mess with network configs and/or create some easy shell scripts. Still, not every convenient to your average usage, and still not as sexy as OS X to a power user.
iApps. Laugh all you want at Apple's iApps. They are quite fucking cool. OS X works with just about every digital device there is out there without installing A SINGLE PIECE of software. Why? for one Apple wrote drivers. But not just that. Apple has actively worked with digital device vendors to create standards to which their devices should adhere to, to be compatible with OS X. How can they do that? well, Apple has leverage. Examples? In 2001, i bought a Sony DSCP50 digital camera right after iPhoto came out. As a shot in the dark, i took a few pictures, then I plugged it in my laptop's USB port, it automatically launched iPhoto, and offered me an "import" button. After a few minutes arranging pictures into albums, i clicked the "online album" button and it created web pages on my.MAC account. It's silly really, but i love it. It's easy. It also lets me export the album to a website on my hard drive, which i can.tar.gz, upload somewhere and unpack. Another Example? Take any bluetooth mobile phone on the market. Namely my recently acquired Sony Ericsson t610. I plugged a bluetooth antenna dongle into my USB port, turned-on bluetooth on my cell phone, at which point the two devices started right away acknowledging one another, OS X told me the phone could be used over bluetooth to do internet dial-up and Synchronize address book and calendar information over iSync, and/or directly interact with my address book application
.
Which brings me to the next cool piece of technology: Apple iSync. That shit fucking rocks. In the PC world, whenever you buy a "device" and want to synchronize stuff with your PC, you are only stuck within the realm of that device's desktop software to make any kind of synchronization happen. Sync'ing ecclectic devices from various vendors requires you to purchase 3rd-party software and services such as intellisync. But again, here Apple worked closely with various device vendors to define a Sync'ing standard. Apple updated OS X, vendors updated their devices. As of this writing, my address book and calendar information are being sync'ed via iSync to my online.MAC account, my iPod and my sony ericsson t610. I could get me a few more.
Which brings me to put some focus on two interesting seemingly inconsequential little applications: Address Book and iCal. Those are two very simple, functional little applications. But they are more than just that.
heh you wanna know stable? how about X11 + Gnome + Gimp for image authoring, + 6 different web browsers for cross-browser checking of DHTML functionality, + office apps such as word and excel to deal with requirements documents sent by management drones, Multi-IM chat client to stay connected with co-workers over AIM, and Jabber over SSL, iTunes mp3 player in the background to soothe the mind playing music from a firewire-connected iPod, BBEdit code editor and 10 terminal windows, one of which running Tomcat java servlet container, another one running ant build scripts, to work on various components of a J2EE-compliant web application, all this and a few other apps running and being actively used simultanously on a 400mhz Titanium powerbook bought in early 2001, recently upgraded to 1Gig of RAM for $180 including priority shipping courtesy of pricewatch.com.
How many times have i ever crashed the machine, and have had to reboot due to a crash? well, TWICE, when i got kernel panics when fiddling with some obscure features of CUPS printer sharing over SMB. But never while performing the typical daily load outlined above on this machine.
I only reboot my laptop once a week as a preventive measure to give the OS a chance to perform a periodic fsck whenever it feels it needs to do so. My daily routine is heavy in network, peripherals, *and* disk I/O. Plenty of room for bad sectors to creep up on me.
Again, this is a 400mhz machine from 2001. It's old. and it still kicks ass.
PC's with Linux do make great UNIX-ish workstations but not nearly anywhere near Mac OS X.
Windows with Cygwin fucking sucks ass compared to OS X. I should know, prior to 2001 i used windows NT then windows 2000 on a DELL laptop. I used cygwin. I even wrote entire application development environment set-up scripts in bash under cygwin. It becomes a real bitch when you need to access executables that live in the "windows" world and get them to interoperate in the "cygwin world". cygpath. forward slashes vs backward slashes. stupid stupid stupid waste of time. Don't get me wrong, prior to OS X, Cygwin was a God-Send. It made windoz bearable to deal with.
I have a debian linux server running at home on a cheap 2Ghz PC i inherited from my sister. I love Linux because thanks to Linux, no piece of computing hardware ever becomes truly obsolete. You can always turn any box into a cheap, decent desktop workstation, or a cheap, decent server.
Windows NT and 2000 have wasted me countless hours of valuable time.
In the end, to me, the best computing platform is Apple. The turning point was this pure beauty of an operating system that is Mac OS X.
The revolution is now starting with Apple's new next-generation computing hardware architecture. Read here why I place such emphasis on overall system architecture. Hint: until dramatic architecture changes happen, wintel PCs really are stuck in a speed dead-end right now. Clocking your CPU chip upwards can only take you so far without melting your enclosing case or restricting your customer base to Alaska.
Bah, i understand your and other people's frustration. Heck that made me feel uneasy too. Yes you and I both paid Apple for their OS. But, if you think about it, what you really pay for is an operating system that is more mature and more secure than, say, windows.
Security fixes, if they really matter, in the end, are the responsibility of the System Administrator. Not Apple. That's the whole point of running an operating system whose core underlying services is open-source software: if you want to be lazy, like I am, you can wait for Apple to release a patch. If security issues surrounding services that are by default not enabled really do matter, then the open-source nature of your operating system enables you to actively seek patches. Think about it, isn't that a valid reason to buy OS X? Having alternatives?
But yeah, rolling it out as part of a larger upgrade is a bit unfortunate, but again, think about it, those security holes are by no means security holes that would affect any significant portion of their user base, since those services are disabled by default, especially sendmail, for which you MUST use the command line. They were on the brink of releasing a slew of updates as part of 10.2.8, why not roll those security fixes with it? I can't imagine upgrade patches being that cheap to set-up, and any less of a pain in the ass. They've gotta implement patches, package them up, publish detailed release notes to their knowledge base, release the packages to their upgrade servers and all that crazy shit. They're a company with a finite amount of resources, as much as they appear to make every effort to please, gain and retain the trust and interest of their user base, i'm sure it still just made good sense to roll out those particular security fixes as part of a larger upgrade. Also, if you look at the release notes, they call those "Security Enhancements".
A security fix, to me, would have been, for example, a glaring security hole in safari allowing malicious coders to write a web page that'll sniff out all the cookies you have stored on your machine for many popular domains, such as authentication tokens on Amazon.com. Because, unlike ssh and sendmail, everybody uses a web browser, and most people who use a web browser are not computer geeks who should know about potential risks involved with allowing your machine to listen for incoming connections on any TCP port. Back in the days of 10.1, there was a security hole in Internet Explorer 5.1 for OS X that could allow an attacker to do evil shit using a terminal. That got patched in its own security patch.
Well, maybe Apple has once failed to manage to do the grunt work for you in a timely manner. If i recall well, most other security holes had been addressed very rapidly in the past. This particular one tanked because it was rolled out as part of a buggy overall update. Big deal. That security hole existed on a service that is not enabled by default. And unless you are an Xserve customer with a valid, active support license, Apple doesn't owe you shit. Complain all you want. But if you enable "remote access" from your control panel, you should have a minimal understanding of the risks it presents and be prepared to cope with potential security issues, and unless you pay Apple, be prepared to wait for a patch.
But you see, in the end, you still benefit from Apple's original architecture decision for the core of their operating system: An open-source operating system. Full disclosure as to where the bug lives. As you said it, even the OS X server people had to remove the system-installed version and compile their own to not be vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks.
Be GLAD you were able to do that. Systems administrators who maintain production-environment servers have had OPTIONS as to how to deal with this situation, based on priorities. Sure it would have been nice to let Apple do the work for you. But hey, if you maintain something of importance, you'd better know your way around the operating system you maintain. But since those are all open-source components, chances are there were about 892739847238974 other people who had found a workaround and/or a solution to your problem within hours of the vulnerability being found, and chances are a good chunk of them have shared those solutions with the community at large.
There is no such thing as a secure operating system. A secure operating system is not connected to any network and doesn't otherwise interact with anything or anybody. Security is a frame of mind, procedures and processes surrounding the usage of computing facilities, and does not exist in an absolute form. Certain practices and philosophies allow administrators to build systems that are more secure than others. But it is all relative.
Take an off-the-shelf Jaguar installation, install it on a mac, then run nmap on that machine. How many ports will you find open? ZERO. NONE. NADA. ZILCH. not one. Why? How many will you find on windows? 5 to 10 depending on which flavor you're installing.
well it doesn't really qualify as too expensive since i got my Sony Ericsson t610 with t-mobile service for $150 with $100 rebate for a 1 year service agreement.
I highly recomment getting the t-zones Pro feature which gives you unlimited usage of their GPRS online services: you can take pictures, record sounds, send e-mail messages from your phone with pics, music, recordings and text all freakin' day long and it doesn't cost you an additional buck and it doesn't eat at your minutes. it's $10/month for that feature.
Here's my plan:
$40/month service + $10/month for tzones-pro:
1000 minutes anytime, call from anywhere in the U.S. to anywhere in the U.S. while on their network. Normally this plan is only 600 minutes but i got a "special"... or something.
unlimited nights and weekends
unlimited tzones usage: things get a bit confusing but here's what i am figuring out so far, and i may be entirely wrong: any time your phone needs to do straight TCP/IP stuff, that is browse the web, or send an *e-mail* message over SMTP, or receive e-mail via POP3 or IMAP4 (which the t610 can!!!) that's included in your tzones-pro service for $10/month and you don't pay extra, no quotas. If you don't have tzones-pro and regular tzones instead, there is a few megabytes quota per month on all your TCP/IP traffic. If your phone needs to send a pure SMS to another *phone* THEN it has to go thru some kind of SMS gateway, it's not TCP/IP stuff, it's more like phone-to-phone stuff, then you have a quota of 300 messages per month with tzones-pro. which is still pretty darn high anyway. that's like 10 messages per day. but the funny thing is that most SMS systems do have an e-mail front-end interface. so whenever possible you want to actually send your messages via theirphonenumber@theirmobileprovider.com so you don't eat at your SMS quota.
The Sony Ericsson t610 is a bluetooth-enabled phone. I've used it to sync my Mac OS X address book and iCal info via iSync. No additional software required. U just stick your phone anywhere near your mac with a bluetooth dongle (or one of the new powerbooks with built-in antenna), the two devices recognize eachother, say "wassup", and OS X automagically walks you thru the rest. On top of sync'ing stuff via Apple iSync, you can also exchange files back and forth between phone and mac laptop.
OH, and there are quite a few utilities that are coming out to allow you to control your mac from a bluetooth phone such as the t610: check out Romeo. It's pretty bad-ass. A co-worker of mine has been controlling his iTunes from his phone with a proggie like that.
Another cool thing with the t610/t-mobile service, is that it's all GPRS stuff. The t610 comes with the built-in ability to act as your laptop's modem: OS X just automagically configured itself when it became aware of the bluetooth phone... i have yet to try it, and call t-mobile to ask'em if this type of usage eats at my minutes or if it's included with the tzones-pro service as pure TCP/IP stuff. stay tuned.
Which brings me to my next point: My current laptop is a 2001 original 400Mhz Titanium Powerbook. it's been over 2 years and it's still kicking butt and i love it, and boy have been pushing this puppy and been making the most of its 1Gig of RAM, especially when i have X11/Gnome/Gimp running on top of all my regular OS X Apps, 10 terminal windows, while constantly building and running multiple local instances of Java J2EE applications. I could however use more CPU power, say 1.25Ghz, and a factory-installed 5400rpm 80Gig hard drive (vs my current 10Gig), a backlit keyboard, a built-in bluetooth antenna (so i don't need to plug a USB dongle), Gigabit ethernet....
Remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity. If anything, this whole SCO thing is increasing the Linux and Open Source mind share. This letter will mos' def' help too.
I'll start by agreeing that Java is not *the* solution to *any* web application. However it *is* a very good framework for complex applications that need to make efficient use of hardware and system resources, and that need to be developped and run on heterogenous systems. The problem is that 99.9% of all programmers, and visibly Mr Greenspun, don't have a fucking clue about what it is i'm talking about, and really... why should they? 99.9999% of all web applications will never sustain more than a couple of hits a day, will never live past a year or two, or will never do anything complex. What matters is "how fast can we get this thing out the door". I should know, i've been there. With all this in mind, who cares if your database and filesystem get hit on each HTTP request? Who cares if you can only run your application on microsoft windows while shelling out license fees for each CPU? Who cares if you can only develop your application on microsoft windows, using microsoft software after shelling out developer license fees? Who cares if your application runtime that listens to port 80 is occasionally vulnerable to a remote buffer overflow exploit or two.Those issues are virtually non-existent for most developers. So that's all good. PHP is your guy. Be my guest, use.NET.
So for the remaining few web applications out there that may sustain, say, 5 million unique dynamic page views a day, how do you make efficient use of hardware and network resources? the basic answer is custom caching layers, shared data resources. Use that RAM to its fullest capacity. reduce I/O. reduce filesystem access. reduce database queries. pool those database connections (PHP and most other frameworks do offer built-in DB connection pooling, but it stops here, this is not caching). If something only needs to be looked-up once, or read once, it should stay in memory. period. The Java Servlet container specification which is a *small* part of the J2EE framework lets you do just that: A Java servlet container can run on a single Java Virtual Machine while listening to port 80 for incoming requests. Each request is processed in a new thread. Your caching layer would live in various singleton class instances inside the Java VM, each request-processing thread can interact with the same in-memory caching layer: read data from it, put data into it. Your caching layer can be simple or complex and anything inbetween. You can write yourself, use someone else's or buy a 3rd-party's caching framework. The point is, you absolutely *cannot* do that within a PHP or Perl framework. Because the scope of your runtime in those frameworks lives within a single request. Subsequent and concurrent requests have no way of efficiently sharing in-memory data without going thru the database or the filesystem on *each request*. Again, this is moot for most developers. But a strong in-memory caching layer as part of your web application run-time can go a long way to build applications that scale better.
Building an application "on-time" and "under-budget" as touted by Greenspun must consider many many MANY factors. If you need an application for which you are 100% sure you won't need to scale it beyond its original user load, then taking a bit of extra development time ahead of time to build a more efficient application is prolly a bit overkill.
The other thing people forget about Java is the fact that its run-time runs in a "virtual machine". Provided you have a Java Servlet container implemented in Java that directly listens on port 80 ( tomcat, jboss, etc.), that is, without going thru apache and mod_jk, there is just *NO WAY*, some script kiddie will ever crack your server thru port 80. Why? because in the worst case yeah, they might crash the Virtual Machine. But they ain't going to exploit some remote buffer-overflow vulnerability that'll allow them to instantiate a shell as root. *that* is a latent, potential problem with any unix daemon written in C that runs directly out of the operating sy
in any case, if you aim at low-end, of course you can build a dirt-cheap PC for cheaper than a Mac. Even then eMacs and iMacs still remain an attractive alternative because of the superior operating system that is Mac OS X. And it's not like you could play any decent game worth playing on a $200 PC.
are you up to the challenge? or are you just going to keep trolling around?
please mod parent way up. very interesting stuff. I am noting that a single-processor 1800Mhz G5 is neck-and-neck in performance with, but slightly lower than, dual-processor 2200Mhz Xeon.
in all benchmarks i've seen, it is becoming clear that while the G5 processor itself is a dramatic improvement, the overall motherboard rearchitecture entirely designed around high bandwidth for data flow is most definitely paying off. IMHO this overall architecture, beyond the mere CPU, is what will keep paying-off in the long-run.
The intel-based chips have been stuck around 3Ghz for a while now and my guess is a key reason has to do with heat dissipation and power consumption issues which could render dramatically faster clock speeds unsafe for your averagely-cooled machine. And this brings me to one main draw-back of the PC world: since so many components are independently architected, built and assembled by such a wide variety of vendors, no single component, and especially the CPU, fits as part of one consistent, overall hardware engineering vision. The intel chips weren't designed with efficient power consumption in mind in the first place. They were designed to sustain high clock speeds. period. MMX was an after-thought answer to Altivec. Most PC manufacturers have always grossly architected motherboards and enclosing cases without ever putting as much thought as Apple did with the new G5 architecture.
Apple defines the requirements of every single component that goes into their boxes. They will find vendors that meet those requirements. From the processor-maker, to the heat-sink, to every single fan, to the hard drives.
My guess is there is plenty of room for that G5 processor clock speed to grow. And when it does, the superior architecture of the enclosing case and all motherboards subsystems will both enable this clock speed growth and dramatically increase its performance boosts pay-offs.
Apple is no monopoly and never will be. It is simply one of many alternatives, and, in my opinion, the strongest contender for the best overall computing experience.
Many open-source zealots (Gnu, FSF) seem to have issues with an operating system that possesses any proprietary code. That is just silly because they are alienating themselves from the one corporation that is increasing open-source-related and UNIX mindshare. Apple proudly advertises that the core underpinnings of their operating system is powered by open-source software. Apple wants people to realize that open-source software is by definition sturdier and more mature, especially when it comes to security, than closed-source alternatives such as windows.
To make things even better, Apple has released Darwin's source code to the world, so just about ANYONE can build their own alternative to Apple's operating system. And people have. You can run Darwin on just about any hardware, you'll just have to use it with X11/Gnome/KDE/whatnot versus Apple's user interface.
Gnu and FSF need to adopt a less snooty stance and understand that what is good for Apple is good for the open-source community at large and vice-versa.
There are good reasons for buying a PC laptop and there are good reasons for buying a mac laptop.
The PC will give you a better price/performance ratio, if you define performance as a faster CPU. Having dealt with my share of headaches related to windows' inherently flawed network and system-level security, getting various exotic USB devices to work in linux, dual-booting between windoz and linux to switch between application development and "office-like" tasks, random windoz system freezes, i can tell you that my definition of performance has finally evolved to be "shit just works".
As far as price goes, all i gotta say is my powerbook is already 2 years old, i've been using it EXTENSIVELY for both work (j2ee application development, office tasks, Gimp/X11, accessing shares on windoz networks) and personal stuff (iPhoto, iTunes, watching DVDs,.MAC). It never ever crashes, i recently installed a Gig of RAM (two 512MB chips) for $160 including shipping from a vendor i found on pricewatch.com. I also upgraded its internal hard drive with IBM's latest 40Gig "travelstar" HD, for $90 from a vendor i found on pricewatch.com. Basically, it has proved itself to be worth every penny and has rendered me incredibly more productive at work. Compare that to that win2k DELL laptop i used to have at work. fucking piece of shit. the mouse would move on its own. the system would freeze for no reasons. Caused me to force reboots many many times due to crashes. All those reboots eventually caused bad sectors on my hard drive which corrupted key files in my windoz profile folder, and somehow some shit had gotten corrupted on my linux partition, i couldn't even log-in half the time. The whole system became fucked after a little over a year of intense usage. Sure the DELL laptop prolly was cheap. but the resulting loss of productivity cost my company a lot of money and cost ME a lot of sleep.
but that's just my experience. most people just don't use their computers and laptops for anything serious or that mission-critical. many of those people do not mind tinkering with their systems, reformatting hard drives, recompiling linux kernels to support exotic devices. And I think this is a very valuable part of one's computing experience background. Tinkering with a system trains your brain to solve problems.
I've already been there. I no-longer wish to tinker. I want a superior computing experience, and i'll happily pay a premium for it.
I'd recommend you go to an apple store and play with the macs they have there. open terminal.app. play around in the tcsh. or switch to bash. found all the linux commands you cherish all right there. Then open some other apps.
it is not just a "pretty computer". MacOS X is a f
live WWDC coverage from macminute.com
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 3, Informative
You, Sir, have just earned yet another fan. holy crap that was fascinating stuff. I wish this one post could be modded beyond 5. thank you. thank you. thank you.
YUP telemarketers, although also pure filth, have more of a leg to stand on when stating their industry generates jobs. Because it actually, most of the time, takes humans to make those calls and talk to people who answer their phones. But i've also argued in a letter to my congress girlie that the quality of such jobs would be greatly improved with the ubiquitous adoption of do-not-call list, as people answering their phones might be more likely to be receptive to a sales pitch.
ON THE OTHER HAND, email-bound spam generates ZERO JOB. look at alan ralsky's operation. that fucker boasts his self-run business, from his new $700K+ house, and his network pipes. he just prolly contracted some goon to write some software for him and just milks the fuck out of it. and bickity-baaam. One machine. spreads its filth to countless other machines on the internet. ISPs. open mail relays. the second he opens the floodgates, the whole fucking internet pays the price and he fucking doesn't.
fuck spammers. fuck them right in the ass. no lube. sand-paper-laced condom.
mod parent up please. sounds like a great idea. however would this information be considered confidential? or since it's a public lawsuit, can those names remain public? or does it all have to remain under emarketersassholes.org blah? mmm.
mod parent way up please:) that link of his contains interesting information on what lengths spammers went thru to manage people who were VAGUELY related to someone who ran spamhaus WITHOUT actually being involved in it.
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sidekick is cool :) i have a sony ericsson t610 with t-mobile. kicks ass too. unrelated. i know. it takes pics tho.
heh heh. uhmm yeah ... uhm ... my dog ... Lee .. yeah :}. aww ok ok: yes i was that cheesy in naming my playlist :|.
Heh i'm glad you didn't see Avril right below Aretha, you woulda prolly made me a foe ;]. I do like Avril tho.
Those are sunset pics i actually took right by where i live with a Sony DSC P50 digital cam :). They make for very soothing desktops :D
Acually application load time is somewhat relevant in demonstrating the effects of, NOT the CPU, but rather, the overall I/O susbsystems architecture. Same for booting.
Google is your friend, my friend :)
Here are a few OSX-compatible bar-code readers. Check both the search results links and the sponsored links at the top and to the side, you might get lucky there too :)
What prompted me to do the search is that i know there had to be some solution out there for macs, because all Apple stores' cashier terminals are iMacs linked to a barcode *and* digital-credit-card processors. Cool huh? :)
heh you wanna know stable? how about X11 + Gnome + Gimp for image authoring, + 6 different web browsers for cross-browser checking of DHTML functionality, + office apps such as word and excel to deal with requirements documents sent by management drones, Multi-IM chat client to stay connected with co-workers over AIM, and Jabber over SSL, iTunes mp3 player in the background to soothe the mind playing music from a firewire-connected iPod, BBEdit code editor and 10 terminal windows, one of which running Tomcat java servlet container, another one running ant build scripts, to work on various components of a J2EE-compliant web application, all this and a few other apps running and being actively used simultanously on a 400mhz Titanium powerbook bought in early 2001, recently upgraded to 1Gig of RAM for $180 including priority shipping courtesy of pricewatch.com.
How many times have i ever crashed the machine, and have had to reboot due to a crash? well, TWICE, when i got kernel panics when fiddling with some obscure features of CUPS printer sharing over SMB. But never while performing the typical daily load outlined above on this machine.
I only reboot my laptop once a week as a preventive measure to give the OS a chance to perform a periodic fsck whenever it feels it needs to do so. My daily routine is heavy in network, peripherals, *and* disk I/O. Plenty of room for bad sectors to creep up on me.
Go ahead, weep.
Again, this is a 400mhz machine from 2001. It's old. and it still kicks ass.
PC's with Linux do make great UNIX-ish workstations but not nearly anywhere near Mac OS X.
Windows with Cygwin fucking sucks ass compared to OS X. I should know, prior to 2001 i used windows NT then windows 2000 on a DELL laptop. I used cygwin. I even wrote entire application development environment set-up scripts in bash under cygwin. It becomes a real bitch when you need to access executables that live in the "windows" world and get them to interoperate in the "cygwin world". cygpath. forward slashes vs backward slashes. stupid stupid stupid waste of time. Don't get me wrong, prior to OS X, Cygwin was a God-Send. It made windoz bearable to deal with.
I have a debian linux server running at home on a cheap 2Ghz PC i inherited from my sister. I love Linux because thanks to Linux, no piece of computing hardware ever becomes truly obsolete. You can always turn any box into a cheap, decent desktop workstation, or a cheap, decent server.
Windows NT and 2000 have wasted me countless hours of valuable time.
In the end, to me, the best computing platform is Apple. The turning point was this pure beauty of an operating system that is Mac OS X.
The revolution is now starting with Apple's new next-generation computing hardware architecture. Read here why I place such emphasis on overall system architecture. Hint: until dramatic architecture changes happen, wintel PCs really are stuck in a speed dead-end right now. Clocking your CPU chip upwards can only take you so far without melting your enclosing case or restricting your customer base to Alaska.
Bah, i understand your and other people's frustration. Heck that made me feel uneasy too. Yes you and I both paid Apple for their OS. But, if you think about it, what you really pay for is an operating system that is more mature and more secure than, say, windows.
Security fixes, if they really matter, in the end, are the responsibility of the System Administrator. Not Apple. That's the whole point of running an operating system whose core underlying services is open-source software: if you want to be lazy, like I am, you can wait for Apple to release a patch. If security issues surrounding services that are by default not enabled really do matter, then the open-source nature of your operating system enables you to actively seek patches. Think about it, isn't that a valid reason to buy OS X? Having alternatives?
But yeah, rolling it out as part of a larger upgrade is a bit unfortunate, but again, think about it, those security holes are by no means security holes that would affect any significant portion of their user base, since those services are disabled by default, especially sendmail, for which you MUST use the command line. They were on the brink of releasing a slew of updates as part of 10.2.8, why not roll those security fixes with it? I can't imagine upgrade patches being that cheap to set-up, and any less of a pain in the ass. They've gotta implement patches, package them up, publish detailed release notes to their knowledge base, release the packages to their upgrade servers and all that crazy shit. They're a company with a finite amount of resources, as much as they appear to make every effort to please, gain and retain the trust and interest of their user base, i'm sure it still just made good sense to roll out those particular security fixes as part of a larger upgrade. Also, if you look at the release notes, they call those "Security Enhancements".
A security fix, to me, would have been, for example, a glaring security hole in safari allowing malicious coders to write a web page that'll sniff out all the cookies you have stored on your machine for many popular domains, such as authentication tokens on Amazon.com. Because, unlike ssh and sendmail, everybody uses a web browser, and most people who use a web browser are not computer geeks who should know about potential risks involved with allowing your machine to listen for incoming connections on any TCP port. Back in the days of 10.1, there was a security hole in Internet Explorer 5.1 for OS X that could allow an attacker to do evil shit using a terminal. That got patched in its own security patch.
Well, maybe Apple has once failed to manage to do the grunt work for you in a timely manner. If i recall well, most other security holes had been addressed very rapidly in the past. This particular one tanked because it was rolled out as part of a buggy overall update. Big deal. That security hole existed on a service that is not enabled by default. And unless you are an Xserve customer with a valid, active support license, Apple doesn't owe you shit. Complain all you want. But if you enable "remote access" from your control panel, you should have a minimal understanding of the risks it presents and be prepared to cope with potential security issues, and unless you pay Apple, be prepared to wait for a patch.
But you see, in the end, you still benefit from Apple's original architecture decision for the core of their operating system: An open-source operating system. Full disclosure as to where the bug lives. As you said it, even the OS X server people had to remove the system-installed version and compile their own to not be vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks.
Be GLAD you were able to do that. Systems administrators who maintain production-environment servers have had OPTIONS as to how to deal with this situation, based on priorities. Sure it would have been nice to let Apple do the work for you. But hey, if you maintain something of importance, you'd better know your way around the operating system you maintain. But since those are all open-source components, chances are there were about 892739847238974 other people who had found a workaround and/or a solution to your problem within hours of the vulnerability being found, and chances are a good chunk of them have shared those solutions with the community at large.
There is no such thing as a secure operating system. A secure operating system is not connected to any network and doesn't otherwise interact with anything or anybody. Security is a frame of mind, procedures and processes surrounding the usage of computing facilities, and does not exist in an absolute form. Certain practices and philosophies allow administrators to build systems that are more secure than others. But it is all relative.
Take an off-the-shelf Jaguar installation, install it on a mac, then run nmap on that machine. How many ports will you find open? ZERO. NONE. NADA. ZILCH. not one. Why? How many will you find on windows? 5 to 10 depending on which flavor you're installing.
well it doesn't really qualify as too expensive since i got my Sony Ericsson t610 with t-mobile service for $150 with $100 rebate for a 1 year service agreement.
I highly recomment getting the t-zones Pro feature which gives you unlimited usage of their GPRS online services: you can take pictures, record sounds, send e-mail messages from your phone with pics, music, recordings and text all freakin' day long and it doesn't cost you an additional buck and it doesn't eat at your minutes. it's $10/month for that feature.
The Sony Ericsson t610 is a bluetooth-enabled phone. I've used it to sync my Mac OS X address book and iCal info via iSync. No additional software required. U just stick your phone anywhere near your mac with a bluetooth dongle (or one of the new powerbooks with built-in antenna), the two devices recognize eachother, say "wassup", and OS X automagically walks you thru the rest. On top of sync'ing stuff via Apple iSync, you can also exchange files back and forth between phone and mac laptop.
OH, and there are quite a few utilities that are coming out to allow you to control your mac from a bluetooth phone such as the t610: check out Romeo. It's pretty bad-ass. A co-worker of mine has been controlling his iTunes from his phone with a proggie like that.
Another cool thing with the t610/t-mobile service, is that it's all GPRS stuff. The t610 comes with the built-in ability to act as your laptop's modem: OS X just automagically configured itself when it became aware of the bluetooth phone ... i have yet to try it, and call t-mobile to ask'em if this type of usage eats at my minutes or if it's included with the tzones-pro service as pure TCP/IP stuff. stay tuned.
Which brings me to my next point: My current laptop is a 2001 original 400Mhz Titanium Powerbook. it's been over 2 years and it's still kicking butt and i love it, and boy have been pushing this puppy and been making the most of its 1Gig of RAM, especially when i have X11/Gnome/Gimp running on top of all my regular OS X Apps, 10 terminal windows, while constantly building and running multiple local instances of Java J2EE applications. I could however use more CPU power, say 1.25Ghz, and a factory-installed 5400rpm 80Gig hard drive (vs my current 10Gig), a backlit keyboard, a built-in bluetooth antenna (so i don't need to plug a USB dongle), Gigabit ethernet. ...
So, you want a cool, expensive gadget? How about A 15" Apple Aluminum Powerbook. If everything goes well, my work migh
Remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity. If anything, this whole SCO thing is increasing the Linux and Open Source mind share. This letter will mos' def' help too.
good stuff. i'd replace 5*x with 100 or 1000*x
I'll start by agreeing that Java is not *the* solution to *any* web application. However it *is* a very good framework for complex applications that need to make efficient use of hardware and system resources, and that need to be developped and run on heterogenous systems. The problem is that 99.9% of all programmers, and visibly Mr Greenspun, don't have a fucking clue about what it is i'm talking about, and really ... why should they? 99.9999% of all web applications will never sustain more than a couple of hits a day, will never live past a year or two, or will never do anything complex. What matters is "how fast can we get this thing out the door". I should know, i've been there. With all this in mind, who cares if your database and filesystem get hit on each HTTP request? Who cares if you can only run your application on microsoft windows while shelling out license fees for each CPU? Who cares if you can only develop your application on microsoft windows, using microsoft software after shelling out developer license fees? Who cares if your application runtime that listens to port 80 is occasionally vulnerable to a remote buffer overflow exploit or two.Those issues are virtually non-existent for most developers. So that's all good. PHP is your guy. Be my guest, use .NET.
So for the remaining few web applications out there that may sustain, say, 5 million unique dynamic page views a day, how do you make efficient use of hardware and network resources? the basic answer is custom caching layers, shared data resources. Use that RAM to its fullest capacity. reduce I/O. reduce filesystem access. reduce database queries. pool those database connections (PHP and most other frameworks do offer built-in DB connection pooling, but it stops here, this is not caching). If something only needs to be looked-up once, or read once, it should stay in memory. period. The Java Servlet container specification which is a *small* part of the J2EE framework lets you do just that: A Java servlet container can run on a single Java Virtual Machine while listening to port 80 for incoming requests. Each request is processed in a new thread. Your caching layer would live in various singleton class instances inside the Java VM, each request-processing thread can interact with the same in-memory caching layer: read data from it, put data into it. Your caching layer can be simple or complex and anything inbetween. You can write yourself, use someone else's or buy a 3rd-party's caching framework. The point is, you absolutely *cannot* do that within a PHP or Perl framework. Because the scope of your runtime in those frameworks lives within a single request. Subsequent and concurrent requests have no way of efficiently sharing in-memory data without going thru the database or the filesystem on *each request*. Again, this is moot for most developers. But a strong in-memory caching layer as part of your web application run-time can go a long way to build applications that scale better.
Building an application "on-time" and "under-budget" as touted by Greenspun must consider many many MANY factors. If you need an application for which you are 100% sure you won't need to scale it beyond its original user load, then taking a bit of extra development time ahead of time to build a more efficient application is prolly a bit overkill.
The other thing people forget about Java is the fact that its run-time runs in a "virtual machine". Provided you have a Java Servlet container implemented in Java that directly listens on port 80 ( tomcat, jboss, etc.), that is, without going thru apache and mod_jk, there is just *NO WAY*, some script kiddie will ever crack your server thru port 80. Why? because in the worst case yeah, they might crash the Virtual Machine. But they ain't going to exploit some remote buffer-overflow vulnerability that'll allow them to instantiate a shell as root. *that* is a latent, potential problem with any unix daemon written in C that runs directly out of the operating sy
heh
i challenge you to do the research and post your findings.
some hints for help.
in any case, if you aim at low-end, of course you can build a dirt-cheap PC for cheaper than a Mac. Even then eMacs and iMacs still remain an attractive alternative because of the superior operating system that is Mac OS X. And it's not like you could play any decent game worth playing on a $200 PC.
are you up to the challenge? or are you just going to keep trolling around?
please mod parent way up. very interesting stuff. I am noting that a single-processor 1800Mhz G5 is neck-and-neck in performance with, but slightly lower than, dual-processor 2200Mhz Xeon.
in all benchmarks i've seen, it is becoming clear that while the G5 processor itself is a dramatic improvement, the overall motherboard rearchitecture entirely designed around high bandwidth for data flow is most definitely paying off. IMHO this overall architecture, beyond the mere CPU, is what will keep paying-off in the long-run.
The intel-based chips have been stuck around 3Ghz for a while now and my guess is a key reason has to do with heat dissipation and power consumption issues which could render dramatically faster clock speeds unsafe for your averagely-cooled machine. And this brings me to one main draw-back of the PC world: since so many components are independently architected, built and assembled by such a wide variety of vendors, no single component, and especially the CPU, fits as part of one consistent, overall hardware engineering vision. The intel chips weren't designed with efficient power consumption in mind in the first place. They were designed to sustain high clock speeds. period. MMX was an after-thought answer to Altivec. Most PC manufacturers have always grossly architected motherboards and enclosing cases without ever putting as much thought as Apple did with the new G5 architecture.
Apple defines the requirements of every single component that goes into their boxes. They will find vendors that meet those requirements. From the processor-maker, to the heat-sink, to every single fan, to the hard drives.
My guess is there is plenty of room for that G5 processor clock speed to grow. And when it does, the superior architecture of the enclosing case and all motherboards subsystems will both enable this clock speed growth and dramatically increase its performance boosts pay-offs.
Apple is no monopoly and never will be. It is simply one of many alternatives, and, in my opinion, the strongest contender for the best overall computing experience.
Many open-source zealots (Gnu, FSF) seem to have issues with an operating system that possesses any proprietary code. That is just silly because they are alienating themselves from the one corporation that is increasing open-source-related and UNIX mindshare. Apple proudly advertises that the core underpinnings of their operating system is powered by open-source software. Apple wants people to realize that open-source software is by definition sturdier and more mature, especially when it comes to security, than closed-source alternatives such as windows.
To make things even better, Apple has released Darwin's source code to the world, so just about ANYONE can build their own alternative to Apple's operating system. And people have. You can run Darwin on just about any hardware, you'll just have to use it with X11/Gnome/KDE/whatnot versus Apple's user interface.
Gnu and FSF need to adopt a less snooty stance and understand that what is good for Apple is good for the open-source community at large and vice-versa.
There are good reasons for buying a PC laptop and there are good reasons for buying a mac laptop.
The PC will give you a better price/performance ratio, if you define performance as a faster CPU. Having dealt with my share of headaches related to windows' inherently flawed network and system-level security, getting various exotic USB devices to work in linux, dual-booting between windoz and linux to switch between application development and "office-like" tasks, random windoz system freezes, i can tell you that my definition of performance has finally evolved to be "shit just works".
As far as price goes, all i gotta say is my powerbook is already 2 years old, i've been using it EXTENSIVELY for both work (j2ee application development, office tasks, Gimp/X11, accessing shares on windoz networks) and personal stuff (iPhoto, iTunes, watching DVDs, .MAC). It never ever crashes, i recently installed a Gig of RAM (two 512MB chips) for $160 including shipping from a vendor i found on pricewatch.com. I also upgraded its internal hard drive with IBM's latest 40Gig "travelstar" HD, for $90 from a vendor i found on pricewatch.com. Basically, it has proved itself to be worth every penny and has rendered me incredibly more productive at work. Compare that to that win2k DELL laptop i used to have at work. fucking piece of shit. the mouse would move on its own. the system would freeze for no reasons. Caused me to force reboots many many times due to crashes. All those reboots eventually caused bad sectors on my hard drive which corrupted key files in my windoz profile folder, and somehow some shit had gotten corrupted on my linux partition, i couldn't even log-in half the time. The whole system became fucked after a little over a year of intense usage. Sure the DELL laptop prolly was cheap. but the resulting loss of productivity cost my company a lot of money and cost ME a lot of sleep.
but that's just my experience. most people just don't use their computers and laptops for anything serious or that mission-critical. many of those people do not mind tinkering with their systems, reformatting hard drives, recompiling linux kernels to support exotic devices. And I think this is a very valuable part of one's computing experience background. Tinkering with a system trains your brain to solve problems.
I've already been there. I no-longer wish to tinker. I want a superior computing experience, and i'll happily pay a premium for it.
I'd recommend you go to an apple store and play with the macs they have there. open terminal.app. play around in the tcsh. or switch to bash. found all the linux commands you cherish all right there. Then open some other apps.
it is not just a "pretty computer". MacOS X is a f
Follow the live WWDC Steve Jobs Keynote coverage at macminute.com.
please mod parent up ....
please mod parent up a few notches, this "n00b" has some pretty darn interesting info on that $75k figure.
You, Sir, have just earned yet another fan. holy crap that was fascinating stuff. I wish this one post could be modded beyond 5. thank you. thank you. thank you.
Dave? ;]
ON THE OTHER HAND, email-bound spam generates ZERO JOB. look at alan ralsky's operation. that fucker boasts his self-run business, from his new $700K+ house, and his network pipes. he just prolly contracted some goon to write some software for him and just milks the fuck out of it. and bickity-baaam. One machine. spreads its filth to countless other machines on the internet. ISPs. open mail relays. the second he opens the floodgates, the whole fucking internet pays the price and he fucking doesn't.
fuck spammers. fuck them right in the ass. no lube. sand-paper-laced condom.
please mod parent way up and send its contents to the spamhaus guys, as food for thought.
mod parent up please. sounds like a great idea. however would this information be considered confidential? or since it's a public lawsuit, can those names remain public? or does it all have to remain under emarketersassholes.org blah? mmm.
mod parent way up please :) that link of his contains interesting information on what lengths spammers went thru to manage people who were VAGUELY related to someone who ran spamhaus WITHOUT actually being involved in it.
please mod parent up. and parent's parent.