why in gods name do they insist on being so cutesy and artsy? Apple should have made a custom BSD or Linux kernel, wrapped stable implementations of standard GNU software around it, and used X. pop on a slick UI that simplifies system utilities and you are done.
You're forgetting something: X sucks. It would be very difficult to make an operating system that works as smoothly and easily as a Mac if it were tied down to compatibility with clunky old X Windows. And the three-button mouse thing would kill them.:-)
If you want something that uses X and uses standard GNU software, why don't you just run Linux?
I'm interested to know whether there is acutally a market for a UNIX/MacOS combination. I agree that it sounds like a neat idea in general, and would definitely raise my opinion of the Macintosh, but will the average (even the above average,) Mac user welcome such a thing?
Remember, this is Apple. The average Mac user won't even realize that it's running on UNIX underneath - it'll just be a Mac with a very pretty GUI that never crashes.
Anyhow on the article - "Opaque folders", isn't this really much like a.tar / tar.gz / zip whatever?. I think MacOS 7-8 had something like - like "baskets"(sp?) of fonts etc.
The "opaque folders" are bundles, basically a special directory containing a bunch of files, displayed as if it were a single file. You can use "cd", "ls" etc. to browse around inside them if you want.
What you're talking about in System 7 are called Suitcases. A suitcase is a single file that contains resources; when you open a suitcase the resources are displayed as if they were files within a folder. You can move a resource out of a suitcase, and it will be moved into its own stand-alone file (something that wasn't possible prior to System 7), and if you move it back, the resource will be copied back and the stand-alone file deleted. Prior to System 7, suitcases could not be opened in the Finder; their contents could only be managed using the Font/DA Mover utility. Trivia note: while moving files into/out of suitcases is the only time you will ever see a "Move" progress dialog box in the Mac OS 7-8-9 Finder.
Could I use a free compiler a la gcc on OSX? Is one likely to ship with OSX?
Yes. The BSD layer won't be installed by default, but when you install it, it should come with gcc - although they'll be clear to mark it as an extra utility, not as part of the operating system, to avoid breaking the GPL.
Can the gui (shell?) be altered to make an OSX desktop look like, for example, KDE? Is there support for themes, and does the word themes even apply?
Jobs doesn't like themes, much to the annoyance of the rest of us. But Aqua is basically a theme, and can be removed (returning you to Platinum), or presumably replaced.
I'd love to be able to run OSX on my P3 machine, but is S3 even going to think about putting out a driver for my Diamond video card? More succinctly, are hardware manufacturers going to be willing and/or able to ship drivers for PC hardware?
Definitely not going to happen, although Apple is probably keeping their options open for the future by maintaining x86 compatibility internally.
Is there a particularly good Mac site I can get this information from, so I can stop trolling/. for it?:P
From the way this article reads, it almost sounds like Mac OS X isn't using file permissions at all, making the concept of multiple users rather pointless, if they all have the equivalent of root.
My understanding is that you'll be prompted to create a non-root account during installation. Various control panels and things that require root privaleges in order to change settings will prompt you for the root password in order to save your changes. Of course, from command-line there's always su.
Actually there has been speculation that Apple is working on making it really easy to cluster these things. According to rumor, it's possible (though not necessarily likely) that we'll see Macs shipping with onboard gigabit ethernet standard within six months.
2) Figure out how to handle the various file systems that people are going to be using. HFS can't handle filenames over 32 characters, HFS+ can, but they both use colons as path separators, while the OS X standard filename uses the UNIX/. Applications generally expect the colon, so an intermediate layer converts the path on the fly. File names that include a / are also converted to colons. Colons are converted to/s. And so it goes... if they don't watch out, they're going to end up with a mess like DOS filename conversion in OS 8 (which really sucked; System 7 had better compatibility).
In case you haven't been paying attention, this has already been addressed in a paper linked to on Slashdot a few weeks ago. When you drag a file from a UFS partition to an HFS or HFS+ partition, colons are converted to slashes. When you drag it back, slashes are converted to colons. The Carbon layer sees path seperators as colons (like Mac apps expect), and the Cocoa layer sees path seperators as slashes (like NeXT/UNIX apps expect).
It's tough enough to learn to type on one keyboard with the continuously-shifting backslash problem, now there's ANOTHER layout?
I don't buy keyboards that have backslashes in the wrong place. I define the correct layout to be the one that every major OEM (Compaq, HP, Apple and others) and Logitech have been using for years, and almost every manufacturer of cheap replacement keyboards keeps trying to screw up. Logitech is the only company I've found that makes a keyboard with the correct layout that doesn't cost an arm and a leg (only $15-$20).
An important detail that I think a lot of people have missed: the difference between a programmer and a geek. A programmer can be someone who shows up at the office at 9am Monday morning, writes code all day, leaves at 5pm and gives little thought to their work until 9am Tuesday. A lot of people are being taught how to do this these days, both male and female. Sure, it's a male-dominated industry, but women can do it too, obviously. The key is, there's no drive to go beyond what needs to be done - no drive to explore the how or why of something.
That is not a geek. For a geek, work is life. You don't stop work at 5pm, just because it's the end of the working day. If they make you go home, you go home, and as soon as you recover from the inconvenience of having to interrupt your work long enough to make the commute home, you work on your project some more. Not because you're getting paid for it, but because it's what you live for. Maybe you don't actually write code at home, but you think about possibilities, figure out how to do something, maybe read some documentation, discuss a problem online. It's the drive, the passion, that makes a geek.
Geeks are a rare breed, and female geeks are even more rare. I've known a few, and they're impressive - most moreso than many of the male geeks I know, probably in part due to the fact that they've had to work harder to get to where they are (due to social stereotyping and discrimination and such). These are the people we need more of, in both sexes. This is what needs to be encouraged.
<tread on="thin ice"> As someone else said, popular people don't like geeks, and often male geeks don't like female geeks. Why? One of the possible reasons: guys generally place more importance on physical appearance than women do, and geeks are frequently not that physically attractive, partially because the intensity with which they devote themselves to their work leaves little room for fashion and hygiene. There are always exceptions, but most of the female geeks I've known have not been particularly attractive physically. Does physical appearance really matter, when you're just talking about hacking C code? No, but as you'll recall from Pulp Fiction, neither is a foot massage sexual. </tread>
Microsoft didn't make the PC affordable; that was IBM, which actually made it inexpensive by making it clonable (possibly due to antitrust actions by the DOJ).
Actually IBM tried their best to make it NOT cloneable, by printing all the necessary specifications for their BIOS in the manual that shipped with the machine, and copyrighting the whole thing. It was Compaq that came up with the idea of having a group of people go through IBM's documentation and drafting their own spec, then having a seperate isolated group of engineers who'd never seen IBM's BIOS build a BIOS that matched the spec the first team had put together.
Remember the Mac users of a few years ago, when the press' favorite word was "beleaugured"? Mac users were similarly fanatical. Of course, they were fanatical about a great operating system, decent hardware, and kick-ass applications, but the point is, they felt threatened. Now, people whose computing lives revolve exclusively around Windows feel threatened by the antitrust lawsuit, and are acting similarly rabid. The difference is, of course, that the Windows users don't have a technical leg to stand on when they say they like Windows - the vast majority have never used anything else.
I wonder how long it will take for them to have a compound in South America.
I'd be highly surprised if they didn't have several already. They call them offices, of course.
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Re:Bats and flying squirrels
on
Calculating God
·
· Score: 1
Then those with large hands/feet where able to fly further and where premiered.
I really can't picture this. Hands/feet have to be useful for doing normal hand/feet things, and flaps of skin would most likely get in the way of that; plus, at the early stages of evolution, I don't see the flaps of skin being of much use for gliding either.
Small hands/feet without flaps are useful for climbing things. Maybe skin flaps wouldn't get in the way too much. However, you'd have to have bigger hands/feet with bigger flaps of skin before you'd see any benefit in jumping, and at early stages that feature would definitely be a hinderance.
Of course, I don't really know much about this....
One possible explanation is that though these where successful, they existed only a short while before evolving further. Short time would be compared to the span of earth's history. If it took, lets say 1000 years for the species to evolve past these stages, chances are there would be very little evidence of these creatures (keep in mind that some species have existed for 100 million years or more).
Hmm, that does make sense.
But as you say, it is a bit puzzling non the same. That's why the "evolutionary jump"-theory evolved.
First time I've actually seen it in use, but.int is for international organizations; here's the IANA's page explaining what you have to do to get a domain under it.
Yes, some of that is window dressing, but most of it is functional improvements, and that's just stuff the average user can do easily without help. There are LOTS of freeware and shareware apps out there that do all kinds of tweaking, and installing and configuring these in various combinations can do as much to personalize a Mac as hacking shell scripts does to personalize a Linux box.
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Re:Bats and flying squirrels
on
Calculating God
·
· Score: 1
Look at the flying squirrel today, it has such skinflaps. It can't fly, but it can jump very far between trees.
Very true, however, a bat's wing is formed of flaps of skin between its extremely long fingers, not between the arms and the body; it's difficult to imagine how that would have evolved.
Also, how do you explain the fact that we've found fossils of gazillions of different species, but these intermediate species (gliding reptiles and such) are completely missing from the fossil record? Sure, they evolved into more advanced species, but in the mean time they must have been very suitable to their environment in order to survive and continue evolving, so there should be plenty of evidence of their existance (aside from simply saying that they must have existed because of what the evolved into).
Anything that directly accesses the hardware (Norton Utilities, for example) will break, but in theory, just about anything else should work fine. Sounds far-fetched, but if anyone can do it, Apple can (remember 68k to PPC?).
On the contrary, MANY Mac users love tweaking with stuff - but they tweak with different kinds of stuff. The novice users don't, but just about every power user has fiddled with ResEdit at some point or another, altering a graphic, adding a keyboard shortcut for a menu command, changing a dialog box, messing with bundle resources, or at least just looking around. I, for one, intend to hack the shell scripts in Mac OS X, just as I have in Linux.
Mac OS X is not GPL. Darwin is not GPL. It's all released under a BSD-ish (sort of) license. The operating system itself does not include any GNU code at all (or at least it's not supposed to).
However, GPL'd utilities such as bash, gzip, gnutar, gcc, etc. can be bundled with the operating system, as long as it's clear that they're not part of the operating system.
Apple Legal is actually being very careful about not breaking the GPL, from what I hear.
If Apple can release some sort of API that makes software easily portable between the MacOS and BSD/Linux, this whole situation could change.
They were working on Cocoa for Windows, and there was a definite possibility of porting it to other operating systems as well. The project has been Steved. I'm pissed off. I actually wrote Apple an e-mail expressing my annoyance on this issue.
For you non-Apple people, "Steved" means a (usually cool) project was axed by Steve Jobs, usually for no apparent good reason.
Shameless plug: Cannons and Castles is a HyperCard port of the old Apple II game. Largely done as an exercise in pushing HyperCard to its limits, and of course for the nostalgia of bringing back a game I loved in Junior High, but also to demonstrate some of the power of HyperCard to those infuriating masses who think it's a glorified Rolodex. Remember, the number one best-selling computer game in history was created in HyperCard (not that mine is comparable, but hey...).
If anyone still develops with HyperCard, and is interested in comparing notes, etc. I wouldn't mind finding a kindred spirit.:-)
That which works well will continue to work well and that which does not will die out.
You're missing a very key part: that which works, randomly mutating into that which works better. Here's what doesn't make sense to me. Reptiles evolved into birds; scales evolved into feathers. In between, there were frayed or feathery scales, then scaly feathers. Something like that. Anyway, the problem is, how the hell is having feathery scales (without being able to fly) going to be useful to a reptile, thus making such a mutant creature more fit for survival? Sure, it would work if there were an outside force orchestrating the whole thing, but we're assuming that there isn't.
Similarly, where did bats come from? How is having flaps of skin between your fingers a useful trait (rather than a hinderance), before you can fly? Obviously you can't very well develop flight capabilities until you have wings.
Slashdot Mirror
You're forgetting something: X sucks. It would be very difficult to make an operating system that works as smoothly and easily as a Mac if it were tied down to compatibility with clunky old X Windows. And the three-button mouse thing would kill them.
If you want something that uses X and uses standard GNU software, why don't you just run Linux?
--
Remember, this is Apple. The average Mac user won't even realize that it's running on UNIX underneath - it'll just be a Mac with a very pretty GUI that never crashes.
--
The "opaque folders" are bundles, basically a special directory containing a bunch of files, displayed as if it were a single file. You can use "cd", "ls" etc. to browse around inside them if you want.
What you're talking about in System 7 are called Suitcases. A suitcase is a single file that contains resources; when you open a suitcase the resources are displayed as if they were files within a folder. You can move a resource out of a suitcase, and it will be moved into its own stand-alone file (something that wasn't possible prior to System 7), and if you move it back, the resource will be copied back and the stand-alone file deleted. Prior to System 7, suitcases could not be opened in the Finder; their contents could only be managed using the Font/DA Mover utility. Trivia note: while moving files into/out of suitcases is the only time you will ever see a "Move" progress dialog box in the Mac OS 7-8-9 Finder.
Bundles are basically the opposite of suitcases.
--
Yes. The BSD layer won't be installed by default, but when you install it, it should come with gcc - although they'll be clear to mark it as an extra utility, not as part of the operating system, to avoid breaking the GPL.
Can the gui (shell?) be altered to make an OSX desktop look like, for example, KDE? Is there support for themes, and does the word themes even apply?
Jobs doesn't like themes, much to the annoyance of the rest of us. But Aqua is basically a theme, and can be removed (returning you to Platinum), or presumably replaced.
I'd love to be able to run OSX on my P3 machine, but is S3 even going to think about putting out a driver for my Diamond video card? More succinctly, are hardware manufacturers going to be willing and/or able to ship drivers for PC hardware?
Definitely not going to happen, although Apple is probably keeping their options open for the future by maintaining x86 compatibility internally.
Is there a particularly good Mac site I can get this information from, so I can stop trolling
Mac OS Rumors
AppleInsider
MacInTouch
that's a start.
--
My understanding is that you'll be prompted to create a non-root account during installation. Various control panels and things that require root privaleges in order to change settings will prompt you for the root password in order to save your changes. Of course, from command-line there's always su.
--
--
In case you haven't been paying attention, this has already been addressed in a paper linked to on Slashdot a few weeks ago. When you drag a file from a UFS partition to an HFS or HFS+ partition, colons are converted to slashes. When you drag it back, slashes are converted to colons. The Carbon layer sees path seperators as colons (like Mac apps expect), and the Cocoa layer sees path seperators as slashes (like NeXT/UNIX apps expect).
--
I don't buy keyboards that have backslashes in the wrong place. I define the correct layout to be the one that every major OEM (Compaq, HP, Apple and others) and Logitech have been using for years, and almost every manufacturer of cheap replacement keyboards keeps trying to screw up. Logitech is the only company I've found that makes a keyboard with the correct layout that doesn't cost an arm and a leg (only $15-$20).
--
That is not a geek. For a geek, work is life. You don't stop work at 5pm, just because it's the end of the working day. If they make you go home, you go home, and as soon as you recover from the inconvenience of having to interrupt your work long enough to make the commute home, you work on your project some more. Not because you're getting paid for it, but because it's what you live for. Maybe you don't actually write code at home, but you think about possibilities, figure out how to do something, maybe read some documentation, discuss a problem online. It's the drive, the passion, that makes a geek.
Geeks are a rare breed, and female geeks are even more rare. I've known a few, and they're impressive - most moreso than many of the male geeks I know, probably in part due to the fact that they've had to work harder to get to where they are (due to social stereotyping and discrimination and such). These are the people we need more of, in both sexes. This is what needs to be encouraged.
<tread on="thin ice">
As someone else said, popular people don't like geeks, and often male geeks don't like female geeks. Why? One of the possible reasons: guys generally place more importance on physical appearance than women do, and geeks are frequently not that physically attractive, partially because the intensity with which they devote themselves to their work leaves little room for fashion and hygiene. There are always exceptions, but most of the female geeks I've known have not been particularly attractive physically. Does physical appearance really matter, when you're just talking about hacking C code? No, but as you'll recall from Pulp Fiction, neither is a foot massage sexual.
</tread>
Flame away.
--
Actually IBM tried their best to make it NOT cloneable, by printing all the necessary specifications for their BIOS in the manual that shipped with the machine, and copyrighting the whole thing. It was Compaq that came up with the idea of having a group of people go through IBM's documentation and drafting their own spec, then having a seperate isolated group of engineers who'd never seen IBM's BIOS build a BIOS that matched the spec the first team had put together.
--
Remember the Mac users of a few years ago, when the press' favorite word was "beleaugured"? Mac users were similarly fanatical. Of course, they were fanatical about a great operating system, decent hardware, and kick-ass applications, but the point is, they felt threatened. Now, people whose computing lives revolve exclusively around Windows feel threatened by the antitrust lawsuit, and are acting similarly rabid. The difference is, of course, that the Windows users don't have a technical leg to stand on when they say they like Windows - the vast majority have never used anything else.
--
I'd be highly surprised if they didn't have several already. They call them offices, of course.
--
I really can't picture this. Hands/feet have to be useful for doing normal hand/feet things, and flaps of skin would most likely get in the way of that; plus, at the early stages of evolution, I don't see the flaps of skin being of much use for gliding either.
Small hands/feet without flaps are useful for climbing things. Maybe skin flaps wouldn't get in the way too much. However, you'd have to have bigger hands/feet with bigger flaps of skin before you'd see any benefit in jumping, and at early stages that feature would definitely be a hinderance.
Of course, I don't really know much about this....
One possible explanation is that though these where successful, they existed only a short while before evolving further. Short time would be compared to the span of earth's history. If it took, lets say 1000 years for the species to evolve past these stages, chances are there would be very little evidence of these creatures (keep in mind that some species have existed for 100 million years or more).
Hmm, that does make sense.
But as you say, it is a bit puzzling non the same. That's why the "evolutionary jump"-theory evolved.
Not familiar with that. Can you elaborate?
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I'd agree with that.
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Hmm, odd coincidence, I did the same. I wonder if Monday was a busy day for DSL signups?
Not that this changes anything; I've been waiting for DSL for a couple years now....
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--
Uhhh....
No?
Yes, some of that is window dressing, but most of it is functional improvements, and that's just stuff the average user can do easily without help. There are LOTS of freeware and shareware apps out there that do all kinds of tweaking, and installing and configuring these in various combinations can do as much to personalize a Mac as hacking shell scripts does to personalize a Linux box.
--
Very true, however, a bat's wing is formed of flaps of skin between its extremely long fingers, not between the arms and the body; it's difficult to imagine how that would have evolved.
Also, how do you explain the fact that we've found fossils of gazillions of different species, but these intermediate species (gliding reptiles and such) are completely missing from the fossil record? Sure, they evolved into more advanced species, but in the mean time they must have been very suitable to their environment in order to survive and continue evolving, so there should be plenty of evidence of their existance (aside from simply saying that they must have existed because of what the evolved into).
--
--
--
However, GPL'd utilities such as bash, gzip, gnutar, gcc, etc. can be bundled with the operating system, as long as it's clear that they're not part of the operating system.
Apple Legal is actually being very careful about not breaking the GPL, from what I hear.
--
They were working on Cocoa for Windows, and there was a definite possibility of porting it to other operating systems as well. The project has been Steved. I'm pissed off. I actually wrote Apple an e-mail expressing my annoyance on this issue.
For you non-Apple people, "Steved" means a (usually cool) project was axed by Steve Jobs, usually for no apparent good reason.
--
If anyone still develops with HyperCard, and is interested in comparing notes, etc. I wouldn't mind finding a kindred spirit.
--
That which works well will continue to work well and that which does not will die out.
You're missing a very key part: that which works, randomly mutating into that which works better. Here's what doesn't make sense to me. Reptiles evolved into birds; scales evolved into feathers. In between, there were frayed or feathery scales, then scaly feathers. Something like that. Anyway, the problem is, how the hell is having feathery scales (without being able to fly) going to be useful to a reptile, thus making such a mutant creature more fit for survival? Sure, it would work if there were an outside force orchestrating the whole thing, but we're assuming that there isn't.
Similarly, where did bats come from? How is having flaps of skin between your fingers a useful trait (rather than a hinderance), before you can fly? Obviously you can't very well develop flight capabilities until you have wings.
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Not necessarily 99%...
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