What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay. If there's an actual consumer toaster out there on the market that has linux controlling it, I'd like to see it (and buy it)!
I only see three likely reasons: security (can't be secured), doesn't work (oops!), government backdoor.
I see at least one more: intended for internal testing, not guaranteed to work the same on all processors, AMD's not interested in guaranteeing that it works the same on all processors, and AMD's not interested in dealing with users whining that it doesn't work the same on all processors.
I can think of many reasons why it might be hidden. For example, it may be hidden because the cost of supporting it would outweigh the benefits of admitting the "feature" is there. I don't just mean in terms of documenting it and releasing that info for developers, I mean in termins of testing it for security reasons.
...and, if it's documented as an architectural feature rather than a feature of a particular processor or line of processors, guaranteeing that it works the same in future processors, even if they have a different microarchitecture. (And even if you explicitly document it as a feature of a particular processor, if you don't implement it the same way in your next generation of processors, somebody will probably have ignored the "this is a feature specific to the Phenom 666" note in the documentation and written Whizzo-Debug using the feature, assuming that any unknown AMD processor will support it, and will whine piteously if the Phenom 3000 fails to implement it in the exact same fashion.)
Most of the phones I've ever wned have been unlocked, purchased direct from Nokia. Never had any issues with them "not working" with any carrier I could purchases a SIM card from.
So you have, for example, bought a Nokia phone, gotten a SIM card from AT&T, used it on the AT&T network and then, later, canceled your AT&T service, got whatever the equivalent of a SIM card is called on a cdmaOne/CDMA2000 network (RUIM, OMH, whatever) from Verizon, plugged it into the phone, and used it on Verizon?
If not, then "They work for me..." amounts to "they work for some people, but not others", so it's not a general refutation. RTFA.
Technology and frequency differences? You've got to be shitting me.
No, there really are, for better or worse, differences in the frequencies used and in the over-the-air protocols used. That doesn't mean that it'd necessarily be impossible to build a phone that could support all of them (perhaps at a higher cost), but perhaps the operators (and I agree with your characterization of them) would have no incentive to offer phones of that sort, so that might be part of the reason.
Or "will fail" as in "will fail to be an adequate replacement for an Xserve"? As Apple says in the document I cited, "Mac mini is designed to deliver services to a workgroup of up to 50 people, or provide a single service to a larger client load. As such, it does not deliver the range of perfor- mance that Xserve does. Customers with high-performance or high-capacity storage needs or with advanced multiport network requirements will find Mac Pro a more configurable and expandable system.", so it appears they don't consider it to be a complete replacement for Xserve, either.
Reguardless of what they are called (and I'm from the age when they were/dev/tty1/dev/tty2... )
is there in fact charactor devices of some name you can access from an iphone app to make use of these serial ports.
Does this serial port appear on/dev/tty(?) can you run a getty on it ?
/dev/tty on UN*X is a device that, when opened in a process that has a controlling terminal, gives you a descriptor that lets you do I/O on the controlling terminal; if you had a process running on iOS with/dev/tty.iap as its controlling terminal, and the sandboxing let you open/dev/tty,/dev/tty.iap would "appear" in the sense that reads or writes to/dev/tty would access/dev/tty.iap.
However, if you meant/etc/ttys, which is what controls where getty is run, you could presumably put an entry for/dev/tty.iap in/etc/ttys. I don't know whether launchd would immediately notice that the file had changed or whether you'd need to poke it, but, once it re-reads/etc/ttys, there should be a getty running there.
Unfortunately, xnu's tty driver doesn't support all of the delay options in termios, so you probably won't be able to hook up an ASR33 to an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, or a Mac, and use it, cool though it might be to log into an iphone, or a Macintosh, with an ASR33.
Using a command line is like second nature to some people, yet most of my generation (born with the fall of the USSR) have never even seen one. Remember that what is simple and straight forward to you may become arcane and mysterious for the future users.
Or not. Maybe the App Store will dumb down even users capable of even minimally understanding statistics (if they're truly not capable of understanding statistics at all, they don't even belong in a Stats For Poets class) to the point that "double-click on this icon and wait for it to say it's finished" will be some exotic, mysterious, incomprehensible process to them, but I suspect not.
In other words, you're saying that the only evidence to support the claim that "Mac users are primarily designers (which is why no one at Apple is an engineer, they are all "computer designers")" is the article making the claim, i.e. that claim is completely baseless?
Once the norm for app installation is the App Store (and perhaps Apple starts putting up "helpful" warning dialogs about "untrusted software")
OS X already puts up a dialog the first time you run some software that you've downloaded from The Intertubes.
then, yes, for the typical Stat 101 or Stats for Poets student who's never installed any non-commercial software in her life it will be a somewhat mysterious step and 20% of the class will want me to hold their hand.
So the mere existence of an App Store will add 5 "It's Weird And Exotic" points to "click on this link and {do the drag, answer the questions}"?
I rather suspect the Apple equivalent already exists, without the help of the App Store. (Those posts date back to 2005 - at least according to the Wikipedia page for the Ubuntu Software Center, the Software Center showed up in 2009 or 2010, well after Prudentissimus asked how to install a shell file.)
I don't particularly like what they're doing now, since it makes installing free software (like R) from a disk image a "mysterious" thing instead of a commonplace thing, which makes using it in introductory classes more of a burden.
What are they doing now that make downloading a dmg and either drag-installing or running the installer (if it's not autolaunched) a "mysterious" thing? (You're obviously not referring to the App Store, as that doesn't magically make something people have been doing for quite a while "mysterious".)
New developer releasing photo manipulation and editing software on App Store. Photoshop looses relevance.
...because said photo manipulation and editing software is capable of replacing Photoshop for almost of all of Photoshop's users. If not, then "BUT IT'S IN THE APP STORE!!!!!!!111!!!ONE!!!!" might not be sufficient for it to conquer the universe.
Because the open source community would make an store that looks like this. They know that most people using Windows or OSX wouldn't use it until it looked something more like this, and that just isn't going to happen.
I'm surprised that, at the time I wrote this, the Debian hivemind hadn't stopped by yet to murder the writer of the summary for calling it Ubuntu's "apt"!
The writer of the summary was quoting TFA, which helpfully has a mailto: link at the bottom if anybody wants to inform the author of TFA of the existence of Debian.
On a Mac running OSX, click the apple menu and there is an item called "Mac OS X software..." which launches the browser and brings you to essentially as what's been described as the Apple store. You can buy software, download trials, etc. Sure it's not the same as the App Store way of doing things, but it's not like the Mac didn't have a similar concept.
The concern is that 1) the App Store has a bunch of rules about what will be allowed for apps hosted there, more restrictive that what Apple's "Downloads" page has and 2) Apple might lock down OS X in the same way that iOS is locked down - i.e., you can only add apps from the Apps Store - in the future.
(My guess is that the idea is that most users will find something like an iPad "good enough", and the Mac will be "the (Apple) computer for the rest of us", i.e. not locked down in that fashion.:-))
If they announce that the terminal would not be an app available on the Mac, and that software can only be developed with "development" machines, then yes, I'm hanging it up and switching to a straight Linux machine.
If a "development" machine is a machine running Mac OS X Pro rather than Mac OS X, and anybody can pay for Mac OS X Pro, and it's not too much of an extra cost, and you can do anything with Mac OS X Pro that you can with Mac OS X, that wouldn't be too bad, although I'd prefer that OS X continue to be, as I think of it, "a UN*X that runs Quicken and iTunes".
The GNU compilers have an objective C front end, so I propose that we use a GCC based compiler to build our system, the GUI, and tools.
You might want to look at that "llvm" thing out there, too; it looks promising.:-)
(To be fair, what you'd have after all that is Darwin, not Mac OS X. The hard work would be turning GNUStep or whatever into a replacement for Foundation and AppKit, and then replacing all the other non-open-source bits.)
Yep. Then users can put it in a directory off to the side instead of in/bin with all the other first-class programs that just show up for other users when new accounts are created.
Yeah, that funny little side directory called/Applications, into which
a lot of the drag-install windows for the applications that people now "promote and sell on [their] own so anyone can download it" suggest you drag the application;
you can drag it yourself if it's a drag-install application that doesn't bother giving that hint (for the benefit of those developers, what you want is a symlink to/Applications and an arrow, in the background of the top-level folder of your dmg, between the icon for the app and the icon for the symlink);
installers for non-drag-install applications tend to install the main app bundle;
and in which most of the GUI apps that come with Mac OS X are already installed (the exceptions being the ones in/Applications/Utilities).
(I presume you're not actually a Mac user, otherwise you wouldn't have assumed that "all the other first-class programs that just show up for other users when new accounts are created" live in/bin; I'll ignore the fact that you forgot about/usr/bin.:-))
Of course, any developer who is serious about the future of computation, and who has at least some bit of self-esteem, wil not buy into this, and will just leave the Mac alone.
Or, at least, leave the App Store alone. The main app I work on isn't likely to be eligible for the App Store (gotta be able to have libpcap open those BPF devices somehow), but, then again, the main app I work on isn't (even if a non-X11-based version is done) likely to be usable by, much less used by 99 44/100% of Mac users (or Windows users, for that matter), and it's free software so it's not as if any of the developers make any money when somebody downloads it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
you're an idiot. who gave the idiot an account?
I AM MICHAEL KRISTOPEIT.
I don't know. Who did give MichaelKristopeit178 an account?
do you feel mad? do you feel that i'm mad?
OK, who gave ELIZA a Slashdot account?
What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay. If there's an actual consumer toaster out there on the market that has linux controlling it, I'd like to see it (and buy it)!
No, you need NetBSD for that.
I only see three likely reasons: security (can't be secured), doesn't work (oops!), government backdoor.
I see at least one more: intended for internal testing, not guaranteed to work the same on all processors, AMD's not interested in guaranteeing that it works the same on all processors, and AMD's not interested in dealing with users whining that it doesn't work the same on all processors.
I can think of many reasons why it might be hidden. For example, it may be hidden because the cost of supporting it would outweigh the benefits of admitting the "feature" is there. I don't just mean in terms of documenting it and releasing that info for developers, I mean in termins of testing it for security reasons.
...and, if it's documented as an architectural feature rather than a feature of a particular processor or line of processors, guaranteeing that it works the same in future processors, even if they have a different microarchitecture. (And even if you explicitly document it as a feature of a particular processor, if you don't implement it the same way in your next generation of processors, somebody will probably have ignored the "this is a feature specific to the Phenom 666" note in the documentation and written Whizzo-Debug using the feature, assuming that any unknown AMD processor will support it, and will whine piteously if the Phenom 3000 fails to implement it in the exact same fashion.)
Most of the phones I've ever wned have been unlocked, purchased direct from Nokia. Never had any issues with them "not working" with any carrier I could purchases a SIM card from.
So you have, for example, bought a Nokia phone, gotten a SIM card from AT&T, used it on the AT&T network and then, later, canceled your AT&T service, got whatever the equivalent of a SIM card is called on a cdmaOne/CDMA2000 network (RUIM, OMH, whatever) from Verizon, plugged it into the phone, and used it on Verizon?
If not, then "They work for me..." amounts to "they work for some people, but not others", so it's not a general refutation. RTFA.
Technology and frequency differences? You've got to be shitting me.
No, there really are, for better or worse, differences in the frequencies used and in the over-the-air protocols used. That doesn't mean that it'd necessarily be impossible to build a phone that could support all of them (perhaps at a higher cost), but perhaps the operators (and I agree with your characterization of them) would have no incentive to offer phones of that sort, so that might be part of the reason.
There are going to be a lot of enterprises running on mac minis...
Were there a lot of enterprises running on Xserves? If so, what's your definition of "enterprise"?
and this mac-mini product line will fail in the market
Presumably that's "will fail" as in "it might be Apple's most popular server system now, but it won't continue to be?
Or "will fail" as in "will fail to be an adequate replacement for an Xserve"? As Apple says in the document I cited, "Mac mini is designed to deliver services to a workgroup of up to 50 people, or provide a single service to a larger client load. As such, it does not deliver the range of perfor- mance that Xserve does. Customers with high-performance or high-capacity storage needs or with advanced multiport network requirements will find Mac Pro a more configurable and expandable system.", so it appears they don't consider it to be a complete replacement for Xserve, either.
When I hear electron tunneling I can't help but see oxide or whatever the hell these things are made of slowly being eaten away.
You need to look elsewhere.
Reguardless of what they are called (and I'm from the age when they were /dev/tty1 /dev/tty2 ... )
is there in fact charactor devices of some name you can access from an iphone app to make use of these serial ports.
As page 6 of TFA said, "The device is /dev/tty.iap".
Does this serial port appear on /dev/tty(?) can you run a getty on it ?
However, if you meant /etc/ttys, which is what controls where getty is run, you could presumably put an entry for /dev/tty.iap in /etc/ttys. I don't know whether launchd would immediately notice that the file had changed or whether you'd need to poke it, but, once it re-reads /etc/ttys, there should be a getty running there.
Unfortunately, xnu's tty driver doesn't support all of the delay options in termios, so you probably won't be able to hook up an ASR33 to an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, or a Mac, and use it, cool though it might be to log into an iphone, or a Macintosh, with an ASR33.
Using a command line is like second nature to some people, yet most of my generation (born with the fall of the USSR) have never even seen one. Remember that what is simple and straight forward to you may become arcane and mysterious for the future users.
Or not. Maybe the App Store will dumb down even users capable of even minimally understanding statistics (if they're truly not capable of understanding statistics at all, they don't even belong in a Stats For Poets class) to the point that "double-click on this icon and wait for it to say it's finished" will be some exotic, mysterious, incomprehensible process to them, but I suspect not.
Here you go
In other words, you're saying that the only evidence to support the claim that "Mac users are primarily designers (which is why no one at Apple is an engineer, they are all "computer designers")" is the article making the claim, i.e. that claim is completely baseless?
Mac users are primarily designers (which is why no one at Apple is an engineer, they are all "computer designers")
[Citation needed]
Once the norm for app installation is the App Store (and perhaps Apple starts putting up "helpful" warning dialogs about "untrusted software")
OS X already puts up a dialog the first time you run some software that you've downloaded from The Intertubes.
then, yes, for the typical Stat 101 or Stats for Poets student who's never installed any non-commercial software in her life it will be a somewhat mysterious step and 20% of the class will want me to hold their hand.
So the mere existence of an App Store will add 5 "It's Weird And Exotic" points to "click on this link and {do the drag, answer the questions}"?
If you don't believe me, just look at this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=107340 and imagine the Apple equivalent.
I rather suspect the Apple equivalent already exists, without the help of the App Store. (Those posts date back to 2005 - at least according to the Wikipedia page for the Ubuntu Software Center, the Software Center showed up in 2009 or 2010, well after Prudentissimus asked how to install a shell file.)
I don't particularly like what they're doing now, since it makes installing free software (like R) from a disk image a "mysterious" thing instead of a commonplace thing, which makes using it in introductory classes more of a burden.
What are they doing now that make downloading a dmg and either drag-installing or running the installer (if it's not autolaunched) a "mysterious" thing? (You're obviously not referring to the App Store, as that doesn't magically make something people have been doing for quite a while "mysterious".)
New developer releasing photo manipulation and editing software on App Store. Photoshop looses relevance.
...because said photo manipulation and editing software is capable of replacing Photoshop for almost of all of Photoshop's users. If not, then "BUT IT'S IN THE APP STORE!!!!!!!111!!!ONE!!!!" might not be sufficient for it to conquer the universe.
Because the open source community would make an store that looks like this. They know that most people using Windows or OSX wouldn't use it until it looked something more like this, and that just isn't going to happen.
How about something that looks like this?
I'm surprised that, at the time I wrote this, the Debian hivemind hadn't stopped by yet to murder the writer of the summary for calling it Ubuntu's "apt"!
The writer of the summary was quoting TFA, which helpfully has a mailto: link at the bottom if anybody wants to inform the author of TFA of the existence of Debian.
On a Mac running OSX, click the apple menu and there is an item called "Mac OS X software..." which launches the browser and brings you to essentially as what's been described as the Apple store. You can buy software, download trials, etc. Sure it's not the same as the App Store way of doing things, but it's not like the Mac didn't have a similar concept.
The concern is that 1) the App Store has a bunch of rules about what will be allowed for apps hosted there, more restrictive that what Apple's "Downloads" page has and 2) Apple might lock down OS X in the same way that iOS is locked down - i.e., you can only add apps from the Apps Store - in the future.
(My guess is that the idea is that most users will find something like an iPad "good enough", and the Mac will be "the (Apple) computer for the rest of us", i.e. not locked down in that fashion. :-))
If they announce that the terminal would not be an app available on the Mac, and that software can only be developed with "development" machines, then yes, I'm hanging it up and switching to a straight Linux machine.
If a "development" machine is a machine running Mac OS X Pro rather than Mac OS X, and anybody can pay for Mac OS X Pro, and it's not too much of an extra cost, and you can do anything with Mac OS X Pro that you can with Mac OS X, that wouldn't be too bad, although I'd prefer that OS X continue to be, as I think of it, "a UN*X that runs Quicken and iTunes".
The GNU compilers have an objective C front end, so I propose that we use a GCC based compiler to build our system, the GUI, and tools.
You might want to look at that "llvm" thing out there, too; it looks promising. :-)
(To be fair, what you'd have after all that is Darwin, not Mac OS X. The hard work would be turning GNUStep or whatever into a replacement for Foundation and AppKit, and then replacing all the other non-open-source bits.)
Yep. Then users can put it in a directory off to the side instead of in /bin with all the other first-class programs that just show up for other users when new accounts are created.
Yeah, that funny little side directory called /Applications, into which
and in which most of the GUI apps that come with Mac OS X are already installed (the exceptions being the ones in /Applications/Utilities).
(I presume you're not actually a Mac user, otherwise you wouldn't have assumed that "all the other first-class programs that just show up for other users when new accounts are created" live in /bin; I'll ignore the fact that you forgot about /usr/bin. :-))
Even today CIFS support in OS X is atrocious due to bad default options designed specifically to hinder interoperation with Microsoft.
And those bad default options are?
Longtime Apple developer Dave Winer was also concerned, tweeting during Apple's presentation 'Is this the end of the Mac as an open platform?'
If Apple is restricting operating system features to whitelisted applications, then it is, by definition, no longer an open platform.
And if they're not?
Of course, any developer who is serious about the future of computation, and who has at least some bit of self-esteem, wil not buy into this, and will just leave the Mac alone.
Or, at least, leave the App Store alone. The main app I work on isn't likely to be eligible for the App Store (gotta be able to have libpcap open those BPF devices somehow), but, then again, the main app I work on isn't (even if a non-X11-based version is done) likely to be usable by, much less used by 99 44/100% of Mac users (or Windows users, for that matter), and it's free software so it's not as if any of the developers make any money when somebody downloads it anyway.