True, if the intent was to release their code to users as with Linux/BSD. However, I know that moving code from one unix platform to another is often as simple as re-compiling. As someone else said, there are lots of other issues when it comes to releasing shrink-wrapped software. The GUI will likely need lots of work, maybe not just to get it to be functional, but to work within the more rigid interface of the Mac. In any case, getting the core functionality of a program to work is simpler because of the similarities. In fact, by using some discipline in abstracting the interface, a development team could ensure that future porting is even easier.
I agree; probably the biggest problem with porting UNIX apps to Mac OS X will be getting used to following the Mac's UI conventions. Apple has very specific guidelines for how the interface should work; I was just looking through their PDF today.
There will be a third-party X server available that integrates with Aqua; however, Apple is using their own windowing system. It's similar to X, but it doesn't suck, and it has the capability to be a lot prettier.
I really don't think the stability of unices is thanks to the apps. Unices are built so that an app can't screw up the system, but I don't think I can say I've noticed unix apps are more stable or less stable than windows/mac apps.
My main concern though is getting PPC compiled binaries. For example, CMU Common Lisp does not have a PPC version. Maybe this is just because it is a compiler issue - but do Oracle have plans to release Oracle 8 i for the PPC platform ?
Points to consider:
A) Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) is on Apple's board of directors and is one of Steve Jobs' closest friends
B) Ellison hates Gates
C) Porting Oracle to Mac OS X in no way hurts Oracle
You'd hope. What would it take for someone to reverse engineer Apple's GUI and port it to Linux or FreeBSD, say? Then any application written for a Mac could be compiled and run on a free operating system, with little or no effort.
About as easy as porting a Linux application to LinuxPPC. Just recompile. So why are there so many closed-source Linux applications out there that are x86-only? Companies are too lazy to click the button. This trend won't change soon.
I think a more interesting question is whether some of the mac developers as they update their software will find that it is relatively easy to port to unix. Maybe it's just wishful thinking but it's an interesting thought. The mac world's strengths (apps and user interface) and unix world's strengths (reliability & networking) are somewhat complementary so it is a nice thing to hope for at least.
Porting from Mac OS to Mac OS X should be easy; the libraries are (almost) there (Carbon). Porting from *nix to Mac OS X should be easy; all the BSD stuff is there. Porting Mac OS stuff to *nix is no easier than it had been before; Carbon isn't available (and won't be) for *nix.
Apple has already ported most of the CLI stuff. Basically, anything that comes with a default install of (I think) FreeBSD 3.2 has already been ported, and other stuff will follow. There have been a couple different ports of SSH floating around for about a year now. I believe Mozilla has been ported - they just Carbonized the Mac OS port. As for Q3A, John Carmack loves Mac OS X; this and all future id games will be ported.
Sometimes moving among the various flavors of unix is as simple as typing make. For developers, it's not a question of "why", but of "why not?". If a sizable market is suddenly opened up with relatively little code modification (compared to porting to NT) then it's good business sense.
The problem is, before you can type make, you have to type configure, and if configure doesn't recognize the platform as being supported, you can't compile it. Of course, if you're a programmer, you can fix it, but many of us are not.
Last I heard, Apple was still planning to include some sort of command line interface for "Advanced Users" if they wanted to install it. How hard would it be to set up an option in the installer for "command line only"? They already have Darwin, which is command-line only, so apparently it's possible to separate the Aqua prettiness from the command line. I think if they offered this option it would please a lot of the server admins out there and would increase OSX's viability as a server platform.
Mac OS X runs on a hacked up BSD UNIX, and the userland CLI stuff will be synched with FreeBSD (3.2 as I recall, although this may change). Just install a copy of Terminal.app (the equivalent to xterm), and viola, you're in tcsh (and yes, you can switch to bash or any other shell if you want).
Security holes need to be shown in order for people to protect against them-however, what would happen if hackers stopped writing tools and distributing them to script kiddies? By their very definition, the kiddies wouldn't be able to write their own tools from just knowing about the hole. Why not just release a patch and some documentation about the hole? This would slow down the problem, at least.
Within a very short period of time, someone other than the people who discovered and publicised the hole will create the skr1p7 |<1dd13 t00lz and the havoc will begin again.
I'm 15, and I was almost suspended for sshing into my own computer from the school library as they assumed I was breaking security on some system.
On the bright side, now that that issue has been resolved, they'll most likely leave you alone. If they frequently see you doing something technical-looking and scary that they don't understand, but they know that you're a decent sort of person and don't generally cause trouble, the next time they see you doing something technical-looking and scary, they'll figure it's nothing bad, just because it's you that's doing it.
This was from my experience; your milage may vary and you'll have to earn the trust of each new staff member that shows up. Helps if you work on constructive projects that you can show somebody, like volunteering to help with your school's Web site for example.
It's the TRADER who's breaking the law, not the FARMER who just allowed people to use his field for their (mostly 100% legal) sales.
I think the RIAA's argument here is the "mostly 100% legal" part. In the case of Napster, 99% of the people are trading nukes, and the other 1% are trading perfectly legal things.
Come on guys, this is retarded. AOL has their own proposed solution which allows different companies to run their own instant messaging services (AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, etc.) and for users of each service to be able to send messages to users of the other services. It's a very simple concept that works on an extention of the DNS system.
Take your current screen name, and add an @ and the service's domain name - for example, AIM user Foo becomes Foo@aol.com, while Yahoo! Messenger user Foo becomes Foo@yahoo.com (notice, different namespace = no conflict). Each user authenticates themself via their own service (MSN Messenger users give Microsoft their MSN Messenger lusername and password, not an AOL screen name and password), so you don't have a big inter-company security nightmare.
Each company sets up servers to relay IM messages and other information (such as whether a particular user is online) between their own service and other services. Each company then adds IMX records to their DNS zone file - Instant Messaging eXchange servers, used to relay IMs similar to the way MX records specify SMTP servers to relay mail for a particular domain. These relay servers authenticate each other based entirely on this DNS information, using a callback mechanism (server im.foo.com finds that im.bar.com is the IM exchange server for bar.com and sends a greeting, then im.bar.com checks to see that im.foo.com is the IMX for foo.com and sends a reply, then im.foo.com sends a final message indicating that the authentication has been completed). This way, anybody can set up an IM service and interoperate with all the other services, without having to register themselves with any centralized body - all they need is a domain name, which everyone has anyway.
It's been awhile since I read the spec, but that's the basic gist of it. Sounds good to me, and it's been submitted to the IETF, so I don't see why people are still pissed off at AOL. Remember, AOL came up with this themselves, voluntarily. Besides, as far as I know, they haven't done anything to try to prevent people from using other services. People just use AIM because AIM is better than the alternatives - either for technical reasons, or just because everyone else uses it.
OS X relies very heavily on the G4's AltiVec unit. A G3 will run OS X. But many of the functions are radically slower.
Umm, I think perhaps "relies on" is a bit too strong a term. It's optimised for the G4, but will run fine on a G3 as well, from what I've heard. Remember, a G3 is still VERY fast, and if Mac OS X had enough overhead to suck all the power out of a G3, we'd be in serious trouble. It's based on BSD; it's supposed to be efficient. The graphics take a bit of processing, yes, but not THAT much.
As already pointed out numerous times in this thread and others, you are not stuck with a 1-button mouse. I honestly don't believe you didn't know you could add any number of styles of USB mice with multiple buttons.
I believe what he's trying to say is, the built-in trackpad only has one button, and to get multiple buttons you have to plug in an external mouse - not very convenient when the laptop is actually sitting in your lap.
But I digress. My real problem with this post is that you say you would "definately" get a slightly out-of-date Powerbook, if it wasn't for the mouse issue. Can the mouse issue really be that important as to change your view of using a certain OS?
Mac OS works just fine with one button (although much better with two), but other operating systems (Linux especially) are somewhat crippled.
Linux uses the native word size of the machine for file offsets, so on 32bit architectures, file sizes are limited to 2GB, while on 64bit archs, Linux can handle files up to 8EB (1 exabyte ~= 1 million terabyte).
Shortly after posting, something like this occurred to me. Not something I know much about though; thanks.
Exactly my thought. It's not hard to set up mod_ssl and make it look REALLY authentic (I still haven't bothered to RTFM and figure out how to use it, but I do have mod_ssl installed and probably working).
There's obviously a lot of interest in such hardware, and people are willing to buy them. A smart capitalist would recognize this, and actually turn this "hoax" into a marketable reality!
Actually, this sort of thing happens sometimes. One of the April Fools jokes this year got such a positive response that they said they were thinking about actually doing it - I forget which one it was, and I doubt it actually happened, but still, sometimes the craziest ideas lead to the most interesting results.
Now if only someone would create a card that boosted my/. karma...
I've built just such a card; you can have one for just $99.95! Send an e-mail to the above address (take out the NOSPAM part, obviously) with your name, shipping address, and credit card information, and your Slashdot KardMa(tm) PCI card will arrive in a few days.
BTW: Before I get flamed, the Hotmail/FreeBSD thing I remember from somewhere, but I can't remember where. I do know its NOT on an NT box, which basically leaves UNIX.
My understanding is, shortly after Microsoft bought Hotmail, they send in their engineers and tried to convert it to NT. After awhile they gave up and left. They tried again several months later, with similar results. NT won't do it.
Linux/IA32 probably not, at least under e2fs as you'll likely hit the 2Gb filesize limit, depending on how the database engine involved implements storage (Oracle using its own data partition in "raw iron" style?). Linux on other architectures, specifically the 64bit ones (Alpha, Sparc, Sledgehammer and IA64 before long) would probably be fine.
I hate x86 as much as the next guy, but wouldn't file size limitations be an issue with the operating system or filesystem, rather than the CPU architecture?
Yes it has. But if you've read any history, you know full well that the christian church fought tooth and nail to PERVENT this. They did *NOT* want thost dirty commoners to be able to read scripture without the "helpful intrepretation" of the clergy. Hell, they weren't even so fond of the nobility having their own copies in Latin! Gutenberg was NOT a popular guy in Rome. To say nothing of all the other science and technology (Gallileo anyone?) they've tried to supress over the years. But that would be too far offtopic for this thread.
Sure, but that history has really very little relevance today. That the church has tried to keep the Bible out of the hands of the general populus in the past doesn't mean they discourage it now - and even if they did, it doesn't mean you can't get a copy.
Okay... soon as I learn aramic, ancient hebrew and latin I will. Oh... wait you meant I should read the translated works didn't you?
Yes, I meant translated, but if there's a passage you're not sure about, by all means, look up the same passage in half a dozen or so different translations. You may not understand Aramaic, but there are people that do, and when several of them work on translations independently, you can at least get some kind of correlation. Yes, the languages are old and difficult to translate. Yes, there are different copies with slight copying errors. However, people have been working on it for years, and they've got a pretty good idea of the concepts of the original text, if not the exact wording.
By the way, a few years ago I e-mailed the guy in charge of the Klingon Bible Translation Project. He says that there are a few members of the team that are working from English translations, but their work is being checked against the original text by other members of the team that do know Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic.:-)
Duh - free thinking is the enemy of all religions. Religions are baised on FAITH, and faith requires you to trust something without hard proof of its existence. Free thinkers have been hunted down and prosecuted by most religions, because one day or another the free-thinkers start to question the religion teaching (ie "is earth really the center of the universe ?" or "why is the Bible so self contradicting ?").
Faith and logic are not mutually exclusive. Something I saw in another Slashdotter's sig (roughly paraphrased): I hold on blind faith that Cleveland exists. Ya know, I've never seen Cleveland, but I'm pretty damn sure that it's there, and it's not illogical to assume that it is there. People tell me it's there, and there are books that have information about it, but I have absolutely no first-hand information about the existence of Cleveland.
They're working on moving the gTLDs over to dedicated gTLD servers, I believe, and off of the root nameservers. gTLD servers are A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET, etc. I don't know the status of the transition, nor do I know if any of these gTLD servers are outside the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree; probably the biggest problem with porting UNIX apps to Mac OS X will be getting used to following the Mac's UI conventions. Apple has very specific guidelines for how the interface should work; I was just looking through their PDF today.
There's quite a bit of information here.
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I just have one thing to say about that:
rm ~/.netscape/lock;netscape &
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Points to consider:
A) Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) is on Apple's board of directors and is one of Steve Jobs' closest friends
B) Ellison hates Gates
C) Porting Oracle to Mac OS X in no way hurts Oracle
D) Porting Oracle to Mac OS X does help Apple
E) Anything that helps Apple hurts Microsoft
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About as easy as porting a Linux application to LinuxPPC. Just recompile. So why are there so many closed-source Linux applications out there that are x86-only? Companies are too lazy to click the button. This trend won't change soon.
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Porting from Mac OS to Mac OS X should be easy; the libraries are (almost) there (Carbon). Porting from *nix to Mac OS X should be easy; all the BSD stuff is there. Porting Mac OS stuff to *nix is no easier than it had been before; Carbon isn't available (and won't be) for *nix.
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The problem is, before you can type make, you have to type configure, and if configure doesn't recognize the platform as being supported, you can't compile it. Of course, if you're a programmer, you can fix it, but many of us are not.
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Mac OS X runs on a hacked up BSD UNIX, and the userland CLI stuff will be synched with FreeBSD (3.2 as I recall, although this may change). Just install a copy of Terminal.app (the equivalent to xterm), and viola, you're in tcsh (and yes, you can switch to bash or any other shell if you want).
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Within a very short period of time, someone other than the people who discovered and publicised the hole will create the skr1p7 |<1dd13 t00lz and the havoc will begin again.
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On the bright side, now that that issue has been resolved, they'll most likely leave you alone. If they frequently see you doing something technical-looking and scary that they don't understand, but they know that you're a decent sort of person and don't generally cause trouble, the next time they see you doing something technical-looking and scary, they'll figure it's nothing bad, just because it's you that's doing it.
This was from my experience; your milage may vary and you'll have to earn the trust of each new staff member that shows up. Helps if you work on constructive projects that you can show somebody, like volunteering to help with your school's Web site for example.
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I think the RIAA's argument here is the "mostly 100% legal" part. In the case of Napster, 99% of the people are trading nukes, and the other 1% are trading perfectly legal things.
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Take your current screen name, and add an @ and the service's domain name - for example, AIM user Foo becomes Foo@aol.com, while Yahoo! Messenger user Foo becomes Foo@yahoo.com (notice, different namespace = no conflict). Each user authenticates themself via their own service (MSN Messenger users give Microsoft their MSN Messenger lusername and password, not an AOL screen name and password), so you don't have a big inter-company security nightmare.
Each company sets up servers to relay IM messages and other information (such as whether a particular user is online) between their own service and other services. Each company then adds IMX records to their DNS zone file - Instant Messaging eXchange servers, used to relay IMs similar to the way MX records specify SMTP servers to relay mail for a particular domain. These relay servers authenticate each other based entirely on this DNS information, using a callback mechanism (server im.foo.com finds that im.bar.com is the IM exchange server for bar.com and sends a greeting, then im.bar.com checks to see that im.foo.com is the IMX for foo.com and sends a reply, then im.foo.com sends a final message indicating that the authentication has been completed). This way, anybody can set up an IM service and interoperate with all the other services, without having to register themselves with any centralized body - all they need is a domain name, which everyone has anyway.
It's been awhile since I read the spec, but that's the basic gist of it. Sounds good to me, and it's been submitted to the IETF, so I don't see why people are still pissed off at AOL. Remember, AOL came up with this themselves, voluntarily. Besides, as far as I know, they haven't done anything to try to prevent people from using other services. People just use AIM because AIM is better than the alternatives - either for technical reasons, or just because everyone else uses it.
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Umm, I think perhaps "relies on" is a bit too strong a term. It's optimised for the G4, but will run fine on a G3 as well, from what I've heard. Remember, a G3 is still VERY fast, and if Mac OS X had enough overhead to suck all the power out of a G3, we'd be in serious trouble. It's based on BSD; it's supposed to be efficient. The graphics take a bit of processing, yes, but not THAT much.
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I believe what he's trying to say is, the built-in trackpad only has one button, and to get multiple buttons you have to plug in an external mouse - not very convenient when the laptop is actually sitting in your lap.
But I digress. My real problem with this post is that you say you would "definately" get a slightly out-of-date Powerbook, if it wasn't for the mouse issue. Can the mouse issue really be that important as to change your view of using a certain OS?
Mac OS works just fine with one button (although much better with two), but other operating systems (Linux especially) are somewhat crippled.
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Shortly after posting, something like this occurred to me. Not something I know much about though; thanks.
I want an exabyte of something.
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Actually, this sort of thing happens sometimes. One of the April Fools jokes this year got such a positive response that they said they were thinking about actually doing it - I forget which one it was, and I doubt it actually happened, but still, sometimes the craziest ideas lead to the most interesting results.
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I've built just such a card; you can have one for just $99.95! Send an e-mail to the above address (take out the NOSPAM part, obviously) with your name, shipping address, and credit card information, and your Slashdot KardMa(tm) PCI card will arrive in a few days.
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My understanding is, shortly after Microsoft bought Hotmail, they send in their engineers and tried to convert it to NT. After awhile they gave up and left. They tried again several months later, with similar results. NT won't do it.
Here is the NetCraft query.
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I hate x86 as much as the next guy, but wouldn't file size limitations be an issue with the operating system or filesystem, rather than the CPU architecture?
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Sure, but that history has really very little relevance today. That the church has tried to keep the Bible out of the hands of the general populus in the past doesn't mean they discourage it now - and even if they did, it doesn't mean you can't get a copy.
Okay... soon as I learn aramic, ancient hebrew and latin I will. Oh... wait you meant I should read the translated works didn't you?
Yes, I meant translated, but if there's a passage you're not sure about, by all means, look up the same passage in half a dozen or so different translations. You may not understand Aramaic, but there are people that do, and when several of them work on translations independently, you can at least get some kind of correlation. Yes, the languages are old and difficult to translate. Yes, there are different copies with slight copying errors. However, people have been working on it for years, and they've got a pretty good idea of the concepts of the original text, if not the exact wording.
By the way, a few years ago I e-mailed the guy in charge of the Klingon Bible Translation Project. He says that there are a few members of the team that are working from English translations, but their work is being checked against the original text by other members of the team that do know Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic.
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Faith and logic are not mutually exclusive. Something I saw in another Slashdotter's sig (roughly paraphrased): I hold on blind faith that Cleveland exists. Ya know, I've never seen Cleveland, but I'm pretty damn sure that it's there, and it's not illogical to assume that it is there. People tell me it's there, and there are books that have information about it, but I have absolutely no first-hand information about the existence of Cleveland.
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