Well, most AV software for unix is aimed towards unix machines which serve as file sharing (samba) servers or mail servers, both with windows clients... The AV software is designed to prevent the clients from being infected by viruses which would be harmless to the server. Also, people migrating from windows to unix (including osx) often think that antivirus software is essential and therefore buy it for their unix/mac aswell..
So the keyboard shortcuts are NOT consistent, but atleast you can use the mouse to paste as per the X11 defaults (try it, you'l find it much easier than moving your hands betwen keyboard and mouse constantly, which is a good way to get RSI) The Apple keyboard shortcuts are much better, they realised that ctrl was already in use long before MacOS existed, so they added a couple of new keys to the keyboard... Most keyboards nowadays have windows keys, why can't they be used for cut+paste? The Amiga did exactly the same as the mac did too... Always consistent across programs.
But the darwin kernel already runs on regular x86 hardware, so it should be possible to run the OSX specific stuff ontop of the open darwin kernel... Aside from that, if apple makes their own hardware i really hope they use their own firmware and do away with the "bios".. There's no need to retain backwards compatibility if they're running their own newly-ported os on it..
Would you rather linux distributions used an inconsistent letter-coding scheme for drives? And how about putting the entire os into a single directory with furthur subdirs containing more files, including helpfiles, libraries, executeable binaries, even system drivers all mixed together. To add to this, we could store all the system configuration in a proprietary database format that requires custom tools to edit - to stop people doing simple changes with a text editor and to make it easier for corruption to damage other areas of the config..
Linux distributions (and unix in general) usually have standard places to store binaries, libs, system drivers, configuration files etc.. The directories are laid out in a logical manner, files of different types/purposes are kept apart.. This makes it VERY usefull if you have netbooting clients running from a single server, you only need one copy of all the system binaries and libraries, and simply give each client it's own copy of the config directory.. Also, if you roll out a standard image to lots of clients you only need to change the config directory, no need to mess with anything else.
The clipboard is more consistent in linux.. In any X11 app you select text with the mouse and hit the middle button to paste it.. On windows it's sometimes ctrl+v to copy and ctrl+c to paste, but since ctrl+c is the standard break combination for unix and dos, text-based programs in windows often use a different method of cutting+pasting, sometimes shift+insert or sometimes something different.. Some X11 apps may offer additional methods to cut+paste apart from the standard X11 methods, but the X methods work too.
But if it's sunny enough to make solar energy useful, then you'l likely not want the additional heat generated by a bunch of computers.. More likely all the energy from the solar panels will be pumped into your aircon!
Well, my site (www.ev6.net) renders very poorly in the windows version of msie (mac version handles it fine)..
My solution was to create a block of text and use css to mark it as non displayable, broken browsers like ie totally ignore the non displayable setting and display the block of text anyway, which explains what it is and why this site will only look correct in a browser with decent css support.. The text comes up in lynx too, but lynx just ignores the css instead of trying to render it and making a pigs-ear of it.
There have been many viruses which don't rely on the user doing anything out of the ordinary in order to get infected, are users really stupid for believing when ms tells them it's safe to browse sites with msie? Also your point about sending a shellscript to a linux user, you point out that the user has to take extra steps before he can do anything stupid, that's a positive point in favour of the os, in that it makes it harder for people to do stupid things.. And you can only trash his homedir, not the whole machine.. So next time he boots up and logs in, he's back to defaults which is a far cry from a system that won't boot atall.
Or perhaps they also have an intel box, which they use to browse the web because they're sick of sites which discriminate against mac users.. www.raveshack.com being such an example
No, i don't have windows atall.. The only machine i have which is capable of running a current version, was a self-assembled AMD64 based machine, none of the individual components in that machine shipped with windows.. Aside from that, i have some alphastations (which i guess could run nt4 if i had it, but they shipped with tru64/digital unix) some sparcs, a mac and some pa-risc machines.. None of these came with any version of windows
The kernel of Tiger may be 64bit, but the userland is not.. Otherwise you would need a seperate userland in order to run it on old 32bit machines, and tiger works perfectly well on my G4.. So your userland and browser are 32bit, and it's quite possible to run a 64bit kernel with a 32bit userland on AMD64, which is AMD's architecture not intel's.. As for IRIX, the flash plugin for IRIX is a very old version that won't play a lot of modern flash files, and macromedia won't update it so your irix machine will increasingly find files it can't play, whereas the gplflash plugin will compile and run on irix just fine. IRIX is also a 64bit os (on appropriate hardware, most sgi's made in the last 12+ years are 64bit) with mostly 32bit userland.
Because in order to have compatibility with 64bit and 32bit apps you need 2 sets of libraries, and to run a browser this includes all the X11 libs, image loading libs, and ofcourse glibc etc.. Severe waste of diskspace especially when the flash plugin is the only thing you'd use it for.. The alternative would be to run everything 32bit, which is also a waste since you could just use a 32bit machine instead.. On AMD64 just recompiling an app as 64bit can often give substantial speed increases, not just from the fact it's now 64bit but mainly due to the increased numbers of registers available to you, so even apps that don't benefit from being 64bit on other architectures show improvements here.
But what was graphically feasible in a pc game 10 years ago would be feasible on a modern palmos or gba device, and what's feasible today in pc games will be feasible on portable devices in the future...
Because if an OSS author decides not to support a platform, it's because he has no use for running his app on that platform, and if people do have such a requirement, they can port it themselves.. This is what usually happens infact.. With a proprietary app, your screwed if the vendor doesn't support your platform.
But in order to port to windows you need to own a windows box and a suitable compiler, which costs money you as a developer may be unwilling to spend.. Also, unless you use things like cygwin, your app which compiles and runs on multiple unixes quite happily will require extensive modification to run on windows, the graphical interface especially is very different from X11.. Also, even if you do use cygwin you will often encounter lots of strange bugs.. As an example, i wrote a program that worked correctly on linux, bsd, aix, irix, sunos, solaris, tru64 etc faultlessly, and would often stay running as long as the machine did.. when i ported it to cygwin, i got random data corruption on files and sockets, problems with locked files, problems with the lack of case sensitivity.. I'm not sure if these bugs are caused by cygwin, windows or both..
Support for non-mainstream platforms (alpha, 64bit sparc/mips) and fixing of the associated 64-bit bugs made porting to amd64 a lot less painfull than it would have otherwise... Aside from that, support for non mainstream platforms is a major strength of open source, many of these non mainstream platforms are and always have been much better than the mainstream platforms, but they're dying out because of the prevalence of proprietory software which can't be ported to these platforms.
Well the installation of the base os is easier on many linux distributions than windows, especially if your using modern hardware like SATA.. try installing windows and you'l need a floppy drive to load the sata drivers from, and if you blink when it says "press F6 to load a third party driver" you'l miss it and the install will fail.
There's also the issue installs on windows all work differently, you get executeable installers that all look and behave differently, and then you get msi files and who knows what else.. Also uninstallation procedures are all different, if theres an uninstall atall, and often don't fully remove the program correctly, leaving stray files and registry keys sitting around..
Contrast this with the linux approach, where apps are packaged up into a standard format (debs, rpms, ebuilds) which are installable and uninstallable with a single command or the use of a graphical tool. The installation and uninstallation is consistent and fully removes the apps..
As for installing quake3, i would open up the package management tool, same as if i was installing anything else, select quake3 and hit install, and go do something else while it was working.. no need to sit by the machine to keep clicking on "next"
Actually, NT was originally supposed to work like this, with a hardware-specific version of the OS but all the apps ran ontop of a HAL and were platform independent, unfortunately at the time, x86 machines ran this code unuseably slow, it was only the alpha platform on which it ran at a useable speed.
Remember when bill gates said that windows doesn't have any bugs, and that what people think are bugs are actually features? Well, assuming this to be the case.. what are all the security holes? they're clearly not bugs, therefore they must be features, features to allow third parties to access your machine at will, in other words BACKDOORS.
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Well, most AV software for unix is aimed towards unix machines which serve as file sharing (samba) servers or mail servers, both with windows clients... The AV software is designed to prevent the clients from being infected by viruses which would be harmless to the server.
Also, people migrating from windows to unix (including osx) often think that antivirus software is essential and therefore buy it for their unix/mac aswell..
So the keyboard shortcuts are NOT consistent, but atleast you can use the mouse to paste as per the X11 defaults (try it, you'l find it much easier than moving your hands betwen keyboard and mouse constantly, which is a good way to get RSI)
The Apple keyboard shortcuts are much better, they realised that ctrl was already in use long before MacOS existed, so they added a couple of new keys to the keyboard... Most keyboards nowadays have windows keys, why can't they be used for cut+paste? The Amiga did exactly the same as the mac did too... Always consistent across programs.
Being different across platforms is not the issue, it's the fact that keyboard shortcuts are not consistent ON THE SAME PLATFORM that is the issue..
But the darwin kernel already runs on regular x86 hardware, so it should be possible to run the OSX specific stuff ontop of the open darwin kernel...
Aside from that, if apple makes their own hardware i really hope they use their own firmware and do away with the "bios".. There's no need to retain backwards compatibility if they're running their own newly-ported os on it..
What's wrong with the directory structure?
Would you rather linux distributions used an inconsistent letter-coding scheme for drives?
And how about putting the entire os into a single directory with furthur subdirs containing more files, including helpfiles, libraries, executeable binaries, even system drivers all mixed together. To add to this, we could store all the system configuration in a proprietary database format that requires custom tools to edit - to stop people doing simple changes with a text editor and to make it easier for corruption to damage other areas of the config..
Linux distributions (and unix in general) usually have standard places to store binaries, libs, system drivers, configuration files etc.. The directories are laid out in a logical manner, files of different types/purposes are kept apart..
This makes it VERY usefull if you have netbooting clients running from a single server, you only need one copy of all the system binaries and libraries, and simply give each client it's own copy of the config directory.. Also, if you roll out a standard image to lots of clients you only need to change the config directory, no need to mess with anything else.
Xcode almost invariably comes with OSX too, atleast my ibook came with xcode preinstalled and a copy on the osx installation dvd..
The clipboard is more consistent in linux.. In any X11 app you select text with the mouse and hit the middle button to paste it..
On windows it's sometimes ctrl+v to copy and ctrl+c to paste, but since ctrl+c is the standard break combination for unix and dos, text-based programs in windows often use a different method of cutting+pasting, sometimes shift+insert or sometimes something different..
Some X11 apps may offer additional methods to cut+paste apart from the standard X11 methods, but the X methods work too.
Also it will be easier for linux to run OSX binaries than it is to run windows ones (through wine)
But if it's sunny enough to make solar energy useful, then you'l likely not want the additional heat generated by a bunch of computers.. More likely all the energy from the solar panels will be pumped into your aircon!
In many countries a basic quantity of food is available for free to those who can't afford to pay for it.
Well, my site (www.ev6.net) renders very poorly in the windows version of msie (mac version handles it fine)..
My solution was to create a block of text and use css to mark it as non displayable, broken browsers like ie totally ignore the non displayable setting and display the block of text anyway, which explains what it is and why this site will only look correct in a browser with decent css support.. The text comes up in lynx too, but lynx just ignores the css instead of trying to render it and making a pigs-ear of it.
There have been many viruses which don't rely on the user doing anything out of the ordinary in order to get infected, are users really stupid for believing when ms tells them it's safe to browse sites with msie?
Also your point about sending a shellscript to a linux user, you point out that the user has to take extra steps before he can do anything stupid, that's a positive point in favour of the os, in that it makes it harder for people to do stupid things.. And you can only trash his homedir, not the whole machine.. So next time he boots up and logs in, he's back to defaults which is a far cry from a system that won't boot atall.
Or perhaps they also have an intel box, which they use to browse the web because they're sick of sites which discriminate against mac users.. www.raveshack.com being such an example
No, i don't have windows atall..
The only machine i have which is capable of running a current version, was a self-assembled AMD64 based machine, none of the individual components in that machine shipped with windows..
Aside from that, i have some alphastations (which i guess could run nt4 if i had it, but they shipped with tru64/digital unix) some sparcs, a mac and some pa-risc machines.. None of these came with any version of windows
You can't really count the IRIX version, its flashplayer 4.0 and hasn't been updated since 1999!
Moreso from the fact that when running in 64bit mode, amd64 chips aren't so register-starved as 32bit x86 are.
The kernel of Tiger may be 64bit, but the userland is not.. Otherwise you would need a seperate userland in order to run it on old 32bit machines, and tiger works perfectly well on my G4..
So your userland and browser are 32bit, and it's quite possible to run a 64bit kernel with a 32bit userland on AMD64, which is AMD's architecture not intel's..
As for IRIX, the flash plugin for IRIX is a very old version that won't play a lot of modern flash files, and macromedia won't update it so your irix machine will increasingly find files it can't play, whereas the gplflash plugin will compile and run on irix just fine.
IRIX is also a 64bit os (on appropriate hardware, most sgi's made in the last 12+ years are 64bit) with mostly 32bit userland.
Because in order to have compatibility with 64bit and 32bit apps you need 2 sets of libraries, and to run a browser this includes all the X11 libs, image loading libs, and ofcourse glibc etc.. Severe waste of diskspace especially when the flash plugin is the only thing you'd use it for..
The alternative would be to run everything 32bit, which is also a waste since you could just use a 32bit machine instead..
On AMD64 just recompiling an app as 64bit can often give substantial speed increases, not just from the fact it's now 64bit but mainly due to the increased numbers of registers available to you, so even apps that don't benefit from being 64bit on other architectures show improvements here.
But what was graphically feasible in a pc game 10 years ago would be feasible on a modern palmos or gba device, and what's feasible today in pc games will be feasible on portable devices in the future...
Because if an OSS author decides not to support a platform, it's because he has no use for running his app on that platform, and if people do have such a requirement, they can port it themselves.. This is what usually happens infact..
With a proprietary app, your screwed if the vendor doesn't support your platform.
But in order to port to windows you need to own a windows box and a suitable compiler, which costs money you as a developer may be unwilling to spend..
Also, unless you use things like cygwin, your app which compiles and runs on multiple unixes quite happily will require extensive modification to run on windows, the graphical interface especially is very different from X11..
Also, even if you do use cygwin you will often encounter lots of strange bugs.. As an example, i wrote a program that worked correctly on linux, bsd, aix, irix, sunos, solaris, tru64 etc faultlessly, and would often stay running as long as the machine did.. when i ported it to cygwin, i got random data corruption on files and sockets, problems with locked files, problems with the lack of case sensitivity.. I'm not sure if these bugs are caused by cygwin, windows or both..
Support for non-mainstream platforms (alpha, 64bit sparc/mips) and fixing of the associated 64-bit bugs made porting to amd64 a lot less painfull than it would have otherwise...
Aside from that, support for non mainstream platforms is a major strength of open source, many of these non mainstream platforms are and always have been much better than the mainstream platforms, but they're dying out because of the prevalence of proprietory software which can't be ported to these platforms.
Well the installation of the base os is easier on many linux distributions than windows, especially if your using modern hardware like SATA.. try installing windows and you'l need a floppy drive to load the sata drivers from, and if you blink when it says "press F6 to load a third party driver" you'l miss it and the install will fail.
There's also the issue installs on windows all work differently, you get executeable installers that all look and behave differently, and then you get msi files and who knows what else.. Also uninstallation procedures are all different, if theres an uninstall atall, and often don't fully remove the program correctly, leaving stray files and registry keys sitting around..
Contrast this with the linux approach, where apps are packaged up into a standard format (debs, rpms, ebuilds) which are installable and uninstallable with a single command or the use of a graphical tool. The installation and uninstallation is consistent and fully removes the apps..
As for installing quake3, i would open up the package management tool, same as if i was installing anything else, select quake3 and hit install, and go do something else while it was working.. no need to sit by the machine to keep clicking on "next"
Actually, NT was originally supposed to work like this, with a hardware-specific version of the OS but all the apps ran ontop of a HAL and were platform independent, unfortunately at the time, x86 machines ran this code unuseably slow, it was only the alpha platform on which it ran at a useable speed.
Remember when bill gates said that windows doesn't have any bugs, and that what people think are bugs are actually features?
Well, assuming this to be the case.. what are all the security holes? they're clearly not bugs, therefore they must be features, features to allow third parties to access your machine at will, in other words BACKDOORS.