Re:What the article missed - IBM's illegal actions
on
The Mainframe Still Lives!
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· Score: 2, Informative
The company in question is Platform Solutions, Inc., who realized that they can completely emulate the Mainframe CPU opcodes by changing the microcode in Intel CPUs.
Itaniums have microcode? And it can be changed to run z/Architecture instructions rather than IA-64^WItanium instructions? That's news to me....
Or do they, instead, do binary-to-binary translation of z/Architecture instructions to Itanium instructions in software? The Information Week article on the IBM lawsuit quotes the IBM lawsuit as saying that's what they do:
Platform Solutions' emulator translates "IBM's copyrighted software into a set of instructions that can be executed by a processor that is not capable of executing the original IBM instructions," IBM claims.
also looks like it has some kind of SQL server, or at least a client designed to connect to one:
SELECT name, rootpage, sql, %d FROM '%q'.%s WHERE %s
Or a library that somehow supports SQL queries against a database, even if the database code is built into the library rather than running in a server, such as, oh, say, SQLite, as per this crash log which says one of the shared libraries MobileMail was using was "/usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.dylib"?
I was talking about things like the directory hierarchy (totally reworked for OS X)
Yeah - instead of/etc,/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/lib,/usr/sbin,/usr/libexec,/usr/share etc., OS X has/etc,/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/lib,/usr/sbin,/usr/libexec,/usr/share etc.. (It also has all those funny directories with names that begin with capital letters, but that's mostly for GUI stuff.)
multi-threaded network stack is probably useful on a device that runs multiple network connections concurrently (WiFi and cell phone voice network)
Yeah, it's not as if it'd be useful for servers running OS X, after all, so it must've been done for the iPhone.
Re:Finder flipping out when network shares go miss
on
The Roadmap to Leopard?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I think this issue of the Finder flipping out is due partly to the finder and partly due to the automounter (autofs), both of which appear to have received a major overhaul in Leopard. Autofs has apparently been threaded.
If nothing is in the process of being automounted, the automounter has precisely nothing to do with any Finder hangs.
With the old single-threaded automounter, if a mount was in progress, the automounter would be incapable of responding to any other requests. As the old automounter was a user-mode NFS server, which handled/Network/Server, as well as directories such as/Network/Applications and/Network/Server, those paths referred to symbolic links in the file system implemented by that server, so any references to them turned into requests to the automounter - which, as noted, would hang, if the automounter was in the process of trying to mount a file system from an unresponsive server (which includes servers that aren't on your network because you've disconnected from the network on which they reside).
If, however, the automounter wasn't in the middle of a mount, it could respond to those requests. However, if the server in question was unresponsive, subsequent NFS requests would hang.
With autofs:
references to already-mounted file systems would be handled entirely by the autofs kernel code, without involving the automount daemon at all;
references that trigger a mount, because they're referring to a file system not already mounted, would be handled by a thread in the automount daemon separate from threads handling other mounts, so if the mount hangs because the server doesn't respond, other references that involve the automount daemon can still make progress (although if they also try to mount from an unresponsive or unreachable server, they won't make much progress until they time out).
So switching to autofs and a multi-threaded automounter will help some hangs - but not all hangs.
As a non-Mac user, I'm curious as to which programs utilize Address Book?
A quick scan of the/Applications directory, which checks the apps I have installed (mostly apps that are part of OS X), looking for apps linked with the Address Book framework, finds:
Address Book itself (no surprise);
Mail;
Safari (I'm not sure what it uses it for);
iCal (for people added as attendees to appointments?);
iChat (Address Book cards can include IM handles);
iTunes (I don't know why it would use it, either).
There might be third-party applications that use the Address Book framework, as well (it's a documented API).
Exactly. Thunderbird's widgets look more-or-less like native widgets, although even there they look a bit strange on occasion, but they've missed some useful native functionality, e.g. by having a file dialog box in some places that doesn't respond properly to "/" being typed at it, or by not having integrated Address Book support, or.... Imitating the OS X look and feel is not sufficient to make the app feel like a native OS X app.
I'm curious whether it has the same lack of fit and finish on Windows or GNOME or KDE (although on UNIX+X11 there's really no universal "native" interface); I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
No. "Linux", strictly speaking, refers only to the kernel, but, for better or worse, it's also used to refer to complete systems ("distributions") built around that kernel, e.g. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" or "SUSE Linux Enterprise" or "Mandriva Linux" (some distributions that use the L word in their names) or "Debian GNU/Linux" (a distribution that uses the L word in its name, but adds "GNU" to refer to the GNU project software in the distribution) or Ubuntu or Fedora (two distributions that don't use the L word). (I.e., if you will, people sometimes use the word "Linux" to refer to Linux distributions, not just the Linux kernel.)
{Free,Net,Open,DragonFly}BSD, and derivatives of them such as PC-BSD, are complete systems; if, for example, you go to http://www.freebsd.org/developers/cvs.html, it gives instructions for getting access to the CVS tree for the complete system - kernel, libraries, applications, daemons, etc..
Both using the gnu/fsf/x GPL'd code for the system.
The Linux kernel, the C library used in most distributions (GNU libc), many of the other libraries in most distributions, and many (most?) application programs and daemons in most distributions, are GPLed. GTK+/GNOME and Qt/KDE are also under the GPL or LGPL. Other software in the distributions might be under other licenses, e.g. BSD licenses, MIT license for X11, etc..
The BSD kernels are, not surprisingly, under a BSD license. The C libraries used in the BSDs are also under a BSD license, and are not based on the same code as GNU libc; the same applies to some libraries that are GPLed in Linux distributions. That also applies to utilities. In particular:
ls on BSD and linux I'm guessing is the same
you guessed incorrectly - Linux distributions have an ls from GNU, while the BSDs have their own BSD-licensed versions of ls.
However:
both run Xfree86 or X.org, apache, php, MySQL, gimp, whatever it is
that part is true - although it's also true of many commercial UN*Xes. So:
I bet if you had a FreeBSD box and a Linux box sitting next to each other, with the same UI (KDE/GNOME, OpenOffice, Gaim) running you wouldn't notice a difference.
you probably would notice few, if any differences - unless you opened xterm or Konsole or GNOME Terminal or... and started poking around, in which case you'd see more differences.
So besides that, what *IS* the difference from a user perspective
From the perspective of a non-power-user mainly using a GUI, probably very little, except to the extent that particular features of the GUI are or aren't supported by particular OSes; a command-line user might see more differences, which might make be more notable if they're differences from what they're used to on whatever flavor of UN*X they mainly use.
That also is true of many commercial UN*Xes, as almost all of them have X11 and could run, for example, KDE or GNOME (I think the primary GUI for Solaris is GNOME-based at this point, although I think CDE is still available). The primary exception is, of course, OS X.
or is it all lower level API differences (BSD not use int 0x80h sys calls?)
There are BSDs and Linux distributions that could run on the machine on which I'm typing this - and none of them would use "int 0x80" ("0x80h" is redundant, it's either "0x80" or "80h" to say "hex 80") system calls, because that instruction isn't present on PowerPC.:-) Even on x86 processors, with later processors a system might use "sysenter" or "syscall" rather than "int 0x80". And, in any case, system call traps are at a level below the API - read() is an API, the under
First, a Safari version for Windows means I don't have to pay for Leopard to get the latest version.
A Safari 3 beta for Mac OS X 10.4.9 and later also means you don't have to pay for Leopard to get the latest version, as long as you have Tiger; if the final version is released for Tiger under the same terms as the final version for Windows, that will continue to be the case.
And some people say that the look and feel is even more OS-X than that of mail...
If somebody says that the look and feel of Thunderbird is even more OS X-like than that of Apple's Mail app, somebody needs a significant recalibration. There are things I like about Thunderbird, but its integration with OS X and level of "nativeness" is NOT one of them - the file dialogs are sometimes a bit alien-feeling (especially the one for attaching - WHY THE HELL CAN'T I JUST TYPE "/" AND HAVE IT POP UP THE STANDARD "Go to the folder:" SHEET SO I CAN ATTACH A FILE THAT'S IN/tmp?), it doesn't just know about Address Book (yes, I know, they're working on that, but Mail.app already does that), they don't turn on the little black dot in the red button for windows with unsaved data, etc..
Something like ZFS, that "touches so many other applications and parts of the OS" has to be the default. Otherwise you have to support two completely different ways of using the system.
Which certainly explains why Solaris 10 only supports ZFS, not UFS.
Please let reasonably well-behaved software that uses resource forks still work.
You are aware that ZFS - and, for that matter, Solaris's UFS - supports an arbitrary number of named forks in files? (Sun calls them "extended attributes", probably because that's what NFSv4 calls them, but they're really named forks/named streams/whatever you want to call them.)
Seriously, can we cut down just a bit on the iphone articles. We won't really know what it is or what it can do until it's been out for long enough to get over the initial inevitable noise-and-lack-of-supply issue.
To what extent can all iPhone discussion be replaced by citations of the appropriate paragraph of this page? Other than the long delay between paragraph 9 and the actual availability of the product, to what extent does that not describe the iPhone product cycle so far?
so it appears that the version sold in Europe could do GPRS/EDGE and GSM 850/900/1800/1900. Whether it will is another matter. (I don't know what would happen if you take a US iPhone to Europe - I don't know what the regulatory issues are if you take a phone from country X to country Y; what happens if the phone has been approved in country X but not country Y? And, if the iPhone is approved in the EU countries, will an iPhone bought in the US be OK to use in EU countries, and will an iPhone bought in an EU country be OK to use in the US?)
I believe satan gets the kind of wood that makes diamond feel inadequate as a material whenever he imagines what he will do with billy when he gets there.
JK: Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming.
CW: What if you have to go to the bathroom or get up to get a Coke?
JK: I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom. But if you formalize it and you create a device that skips certain second increments, you've got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They've done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial.
(Did you sign a contract where one of the terms is that you have to watch the ads? I rather suspect not, Mr. Kellner's belief to the contrary nonwithstanding....)
BTW 'Minimal Power Management' sounds like it does just the opposite of what it really does.
I.e., it should be parsed as "(Minimal Power) Management" rather than "Minimal (Power Managerment)"? Or, in other words, it attempts to minimize power usage, not to minimize management of power usage?
They need to constantly update the journal, or other file system info, atime or no, every few seconds to assure whatever fsck program, that the fs info contained in the journal or elsewhere is up-to-date.
They need to update the journal, or otherwise push stuff to disk, if there's stuff on disk that's not up-to-date with what's in memory. Once that's done, everything that was pushed from memory to disk is now up-to-date on disk, so only stuff changed in memory after it was pushed to disk needs to go to disk again. If you're not writing to the file systems, eventually everything in memory will be up-to-date on disk, and the file system doesn't have to write to the disk any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Itaniums have microcode? And it can be changed to run z/Architecture instructions rather than IA-64^WItanium instructions? That's news to me....
Or do they, instead, do binary-to-binary translation of z/Architecture instructions to Itanium instructions in software? The Information Week article on the IBM lawsuit quotes the IBM lawsuit as saying that's what they do:
Or a library that somehow supports SQL queries against a database, even if the database code is built into the library rather than running in a server, such as, oh, say, SQLite, as per this crash log which says one of the shared libraries MobileMail was using was "/usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.dylib"?
Yeah - instead of /etc, /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/sbin, /usr/libexec, /usr/share etc., OS X has /etc, /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/sbin, /usr/libexec, /usr/share etc.. (It also has all those funny directories with names that begin with capital letters, but that's mostly for GUI stuff.)
Yeah, it's not as if it'd be useful for servers running OS X, after all, so it must've been done for the iPhone.
If nothing is in the process of being automounted, the automounter has precisely nothing to do with any Finder hangs.
With the old single-threaded automounter, if a mount was in progress, the automounter would be incapable of responding to any other requests. As the old automounter was a user-mode NFS server, which handled /Network/Server, as well as directories such as /Network/Applications and /Network/Server, those paths referred to symbolic links in the file system implemented by that server, so any references to them turned into requests to the automounter - which, as noted, would hang, if the automounter was in the process of trying to mount a file system from an unresponsive server (which includes servers that aren't on your network because you've disconnected from the network on which they reside).
If, however, the automounter wasn't in the middle of a mount, it could respond to those requests. However, if the server in question was unresponsive, subsequent NFS requests would hang.
With autofs:
So switching to autofs and a multi-threaded automounter will help some hangs - but not all hangs.
A quick scan of the /Applications directory, which checks the apps I have installed (mostly apps that are part of OS X), looking for apps linked with the Address Book framework, finds:
There might be third-party applications that use the Address Book framework, as well (it's a documented API).
Exactly. Thunderbird's widgets look more-or-less like native widgets, although even there they look a bit strange on occasion, but they've missed some useful native functionality, e.g. by having a file dialog box in some places that doesn't respond properly to "/" being typed at it, or by not having integrated Address Book support, or.... Imitating the OS X look and feel is not sufficient to make the app feel like a native OS X app.
I'm curious whether it has the same lack of fit and finish on Windows or GNOME or KDE (although on UNIX+X11 there's really no universal "native" interface); I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
No. "Linux", strictly speaking, refers only to the kernel, but, for better or worse, it's also used to refer to complete systems ("distributions") built around that kernel, e.g. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" or "SUSE Linux Enterprise" or "Mandriva Linux" (some distributions that use the L word in their names) or "Debian GNU/Linux" (a distribution that uses the L word in its name, but adds "GNU" to refer to the GNU project software in the distribution) or Ubuntu or Fedora (two distributions that don't use the L word). (I.e., if you will, people sometimes use the word "Linux" to refer to Linux distributions, not just the Linux kernel.)
{Free,Net,Open,DragonFly}BSD, and derivatives of them such as PC-BSD, are complete systems; if, for example, you go to http://www.freebsd.org/developers/cvs.html, it gives instructions for getting access to the CVS tree for the complete system - kernel, libraries, applications, daemons, etc..
The Linux kernel, the C library used in most distributions (GNU libc), many of the other libraries in most distributions, and many (most?) application programs and daemons in most distributions, are GPLed. GTK+/GNOME and Qt/KDE are also under the GPL or LGPL. Other software in the distributions might be under other licenses, e.g. BSD licenses, MIT license for X11, etc..
The BSD kernels are, not surprisingly, under a BSD license. The C libraries used in the BSDs are also under a BSD license, and are not based on the same code as GNU libc; the same applies to some libraries that are GPLed in Linux distributions. That also applies to utilities. In particular:
you guessed incorrectly - Linux distributions have an ls from GNU, while the BSDs have their own BSD-licensed versions of ls.
However:
that part is true - although it's also true of many commercial UN*Xes. So:
you probably would notice few, if any differences - unless you opened xterm or Konsole or GNOME Terminal or... and started poking around, in which case you'd see more differences.
From the perspective of a non-power-user mainly using a GUI, probably very little, except to the extent that particular features of the GUI are or aren't supported by particular OSes; a command-line user might see more differences, which might make be more notable if they're differences from what they're used to on whatever flavor of UN*X they mainly use.
That also is true of many commercial UN*Xes, as almost all of them have X11 and could run, for example, KDE or GNOME (I think the primary GUI for Solaris is GNOME-based at this point, although I think CDE is still available). The primary exception is, of course, OS X.
There are BSDs and Linux distributions that could run on the machine on which I'm typing this - and none of them would use "int 0x80" ("0x80h" is redundant, it's either "0x80" or "80h" to say "hex 80") system calls, because that instruction isn't present on PowerPC. :-) Even on x86 processors, with later processors a system might use "sysenter" or "syscall" rather than "int 0x80". And, in any case, system call traps are at a level below the API - read() is an API, the under
The nonprofit corporation, wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, to be precise.
A Safari 3 beta for Mac OS X 10.4.9 and later also means you don't have to pay for Leopard to get the latest version, as long as you have Tiger; if the final version is released for Tiger under the same terms as the final version for Windows, that will continue to be the case.
If somebody says that the look and feel of Thunderbird is even more OS X-like than that of Apple's Mail app, somebody needs a significant recalibration. There are things I like about Thunderbird, but its integration with OS X and level of "nativeness" is NOT one of them - the file dialogs are sometimes a bit alien-feeling (especially the one for attaching - WHY THE HELL CAN'T I JUST TYPE "/" AND HAVE IT POP UP THE STANDARD "Go to the folder:" SHEET SO I CAN ATTACH A FILE THAT'S IN /tmp?), it doesn't just know about Address Book (yes, I know, they're working on that, but Mail.app already does that), they don't turn on the little black dot in the red button for windows with unsaved data, etc..
...and complete with a "User Agent" menu item, which is sometimes useful for dealing with sites that only let certain browsers in.
The price of copy-on-write. Other systems with a copy-on-write file system can exhibit this behavior.
Which certainly explains why Solaris 10 only supports ZFS, not UFS.
Oh, wait, it doesn't....
You are aware that ZFS - and, for that matter, Solaris's UFS - supports an arbitrary number of named forks in files? (Sun calls them "extended attributes", probably because that's what NFSv4 calls them, but they're really named forks/named streams/whatever you want to call them.)
To what extent can all iPhone discussion be replaced by citations of the appropriate paragraph of this page? Other than the long delay between paragraph 9 and the actual availability of the product, to what extent does that not describe the iPhone product cycle so far?
Speak for yourself.
We put "2000" after it, instead? :-)
The current iPhone tech specs page says:
so it appears that the version sold in Europe could do GPRS/EDGE and GSM 850/900/1800/1900. Whether it will is another matter. (I don't know what would happen if you take a US iPhone to Europe - I don't know what the regulatory issues are if you take a phone from country X to country Y; what happens if the phone has been approved in country X but not country Y? And, if the iPhone is approved in the EU countries, will an iPhone bought in the US be OK to use in EU countries, and will an iPhone bought in an EU country be OK to use in the US?)
More like re-badged (and SSE3-enhanced, and dual-cored) Pentium M's.
I think most Pentium 4's were 64-bit at that point. However, no Pentium M's were; Core Duo (and Core Solo) were 32-bit only.
And here I thought Satan was the bottom, not the top.
Solaris.
Mac OS X.
The former head of TBS is willing to put up with bathroom breaks, but thinks part of your contract is that you have to watch the commercials:
(Did you sign a contract where one of the terms is that you have to watch the ads? I rather suspect not, Mr. Kellner's belief to the contrary nonwithstanding....)
I.e., it should be parsed as "(Minimal Power) Management" rather than "Minimal (Power Managerment)"? Or, in other words, it attempts to minimize power usage, not to minimize management of power usage?
They need to update the journal, or otherwise push stuff to disk, if there's stuff on disk that's not up-to-date with what's in memory. Once that's done, everything that was pushed from memory to disk is now up-to-date on disk, so only stuff changed in memory after it was pushed to disk needs to go to disk again. If you're not writing to the file systems, eventually everything in memory will be up-to-date on disk, and the file system doesn't have to write to the disk any more.