Having a GUI on the server allows for simpler administration.
Why bother having a GUI itself, when there's no display? Why is this better than having some admin apps that use X, so use the display system of whatever computer you happen to be at, as opposed to running a GUI that will mostly not be seen.
Of course, console based administration is fine, too - but, Apple is about making things simple, even if you weren't raised a systems administrator. And contrary to Microsoft, their definition of "easy" doesn't correlate with the level of insecurity the system has.
Not sure I can agree with that. Microsofts systems except in a few rare cases are not really inherantly insecure, the insecurity comes from the fact that untrained people are acting as admins, and don't really know what they're doing. So they forget to update, they run more services than they should, and so on and so forth.
I don't believe a GUI, regardless of which megacorp made it, can replace proper training. If anything OS X Server will kind of have the same problem, as people will say "ah, if I use MacOS I won't have to think" - oops, that extra service you were running just got rooted.
Is this really a level playing field? I don't know much about PPC support in Linux but I do know that it's certainly not as slick on the desktop on a Mac as it is on a PC.
Isn't testing OS X vs Linux on Apple hardware kind of giving OS X an unfair advantage as Apple know the ins and outs of their proprietary hardware so can throw in all kinds of optimizations?
I'd be more interested to see Darwin/x86 go against Linux for web serving, especially if you throw in the Tux kernel module web server (good for performance).
Why do you dislike Linux so much? I haven't tried FreeBSD so I don't know why its users are so loyal. Considering it's lack of hardware support/ease of use compared to Linux, what makes it so much better?
Umm, a streaming server for a closed and proprietary media format.....
What about OpenPlay [apple.com]
And a project that appears to have been abandoned (the last newsletter says Happy new year 2000)?
Darwin is great for OSX developers because it lets you look into the source of OSX and see how it works. It's not particularly useful as an x86 platform
Don't confuse OS X with Darwin. We already know how most of OS X works, although it has some neat stuff it's hardly revolutionary tech wise. Considering that Darwin itself isn't all that useful except perhaps to help improve OS X (a proprietary product) I'm left wondering why it's released in the first place.
So here we have "the x86 version 6.0.2 of Darwin, the FreeBSD-based core of Mac OS X". Huh? Is it just the user interface part of OS X that there's no x86 version of? And exactly how much stuff does this "FreeBSD-based core" contain? Is it just a kernel, filesystem, and some basic utilities, or what?
Darwin itself is just the kernel, some drivers, some tools (mostly bsd and gnu) and a few bits and bobs like NetInfo. Large parts aren't actually BSD however, like the microkernelness, and they have their own IO APIs (IOKit).
MacOS X is then everything else - not just Aqua as some suggest, but Quartz, Aqua, all the utilities/programs (finder, mac ui, control center), the iApps, Cocoa, Carbon etc. In fact, virtually everything that you need to have a useful OS.
From what I've seen so far, it seems that Darwin/x86 is at about the same level that Linux was in terms of features/hardware support in 1993.
Could anybody give me a rundown of why you'd want to run this on your PC over say RedHat 8, which is also available for free, and under the GPL to boot?
We've never needed one, but I wonder. There's a lot of bad stuff going down in the tech world lately. Bad laws especially, but also good-to-honest corruption in the government (Microsoft political pressure etc). And of course you have shady working practices now, which wasn't always the case.
I wonder what would happen if we did organize a union. Most big unions ensure their members are happy through the threat of strike. Well, that wouldn't work too well for the IT industry, as there tend not to be many of us in most companies, perhaps some sys admins and some programmers. And like I said, the issues tend to be more ones that affect us all as an industry, as opposed to single organizations.
Just imagine if the US govt passed whichever mad law it is that would outlaw Linux (CCTPDA??). If I remember correctly, Europe has an equivalent in the works. I think most of us, even those who didn't use Linux, would be pretty pissed. What would happen to the Western economy if parts of the net were sort of shut down for a few days? I think they'd get the picture.
Right now of course this is just paranoid speculation, but in the future, who knows. We may suddenly find we need to start standing up for the tech industry.
What I'm saying is this: it sounds to me like there's no realistic, nontrivial, legitimate use for this software. The idea sounds cool on the surface, but I have some serious doubts about its practicality.
On the contrary, FreeNet is used by a lot of Chinese people as it's a good way of distributing information without being traced. Right now freedom of speech may not be a problem for us, but we're lucky.
1) I cannot control what is in my datastore. Free speech or not, I'm not going to cache your kiddieporn for you. So if I know that there's a file I don't want, give me a way to blacklist it. If it's encrypted then it's another story.
That's the whole point. If people could figure out what was in your data store, then the concept of free speech would be meaningless as you could be forced to hand over lists of content and then have it removed. Having the owner not able to see is the only way of guaranteeing that content cannot be deleted.
2) My files aren't shared permanently. If nobody requests the files I injected, they are thrown out after a while, even if my node is online 24/7. That's just plain stupid.
If you run a non-transient node this isn't the case, but this is like running a web server, so you need a 24/7 machine with lots of bandwidth. If you publish data that is popular, and then go offline however, that data is still available - it's more like the web than Gnutella.
Yes, I cannot see how anonymous posting would be useful for porn or MP3's.
Although of course you could use it for trading porn/mp3s, in reality the upload/propagate nature of it means that it's not simply a case of "publishing" a folder, you have to explicitly upload files to it. Due to the lack of a built in search protocol (hence the existance of search engines for it) you'd be much better off using Kazaa.
For those who have never heard of FreeNet, here's a quick rundown.
FreeNet is essentially the bulletproof P2P data exchange. It's practically impossible to destroy, or track down people who are on it. It is NOT designed for swapping MP3s or porn for those who have got the wrong idea, it's purpose is (as the name implies) to guarantee freedom of speech by allowing totally anonymous yet scalable publishing.
Scalable? Yes, one of the more interesting aspects of Freenet is it's intelligent caching and retrieval system. This isn't Gnutella, when you request a file it traverses the nodes being cached at each level. Therefore, the more a file is requested, the more distributed it becomes and the easier it becomes to get to - the opposite of the web.
FreeNet takes the form of a web for new users, you can "surf" the FreeWeb, and there was at one point a google-style search engine for it, I have no idea if that's the case. Some of the problems I remember were that it was often hard or impossible to reach certain pages as they hadn't propagated enough to be found before the timeouts were hit, and even then the timeouts were pretty high (like 2 minutes). On the more popular sites the owners would have to manually request it from different parts of the FreeNet in order to make it accessible.
Another problem was that because nothing can ever be deleted from the FreeNet once published, it was hard to do news/blog style sites: at the time they used JavaScript date based redirects, I think that shows how long ago I used it. Suffice to say that I'll be trying this release with interest.
Because OS X seems to deliver on all of the promises that Linux has been making for years.
Not quite - for years Linux has been promising an open, free and flexible desktop. So far we're getting there, but we never gave a timeframe for it. Nobody ever said (or nobody who knew what they were talking about anyway) - we'll be done in 3 years. It'll never be "done", that's just the nature of it.
It should also be noted that making a totally flexible desktop with pluggable UIs is a hell of a lot harder than simply providing one. For instance, the vFolder menu system is generated dynamically depending on how the distro/user/desktop wishes the menu to operate. Everything has to be standardized, because you've got at least 4 or 5 desktops that people want to use, so your technologies have to accomodate that.
Finally, note that Apple have thrown far more resources into the desktop than RedHat/SuSE/volunteers have combined. That's life - the Linux desktop is still under construction. It will be really really great, one day. Promise.
Amazingly, it doesn't seem to sacrifice any flexibility or power for its' simplicity. When Linux makes me as productive as OS X, I'll go back in a second. Until then, you can pry my iBook out of my cold dead fingers.
No, you sacrifice lots of flexibility. If we ignore dodgy 3rd party hacks, OS X has no flexibility in its UI at all, it can't even be themed, let alone change the window manager etc. If you find the defaults work great for you, fantastic, but don't confuse that with flexibility. And of course, OS X is not free - you use it now and life is good yes? But you are slowly being locked into it. You're assuming that it'd take no effort to switch back to Linux, but what are you going to do with all the data generated by Mac only apps? I dunno, beats me.
Until then though, you can help us out by not whinging about things that ceased to be relevant years ago - I've never had to alter the XFree config files, it's all automatic, and is getting more automatic all the time. The long term aim of the X developers is to eliminate the config files entirely. You've made your choice because you think the Mac is easier than Linux, but I have the opposite opinion, yet you don't see me saying "when OS X is themable and has a pluggable WM then I'll switch in an instant" do you? It's not helpful.
Hey, is there a copy of this Ellen Feiss video in DivX? I've heard the jokes, seen the fansites, and now want to see what caused all the fuss in the first place.
But I don't have, and don't intend to get QuickTime, crossover or not. The Two Towers trailor played better in the DivX version I found anyway, so is there a divx of this advert anywhere? Does a QT Pro owner care to convert it?
I seem to recall reading Jeremy White of codeweavers saying that the Sherman act prevented them from tying a non monopoly product to a monopoly product. If they explictly block people who don't use Windows, isn't that an anti-trust violation?
Sure, tux is a great mascot! He is cute, we've probably just got too used to seeing him. He is also capable of "actions", ie you can dress him up in a suit for business, and he can do things that the regular Windows or MacOS logo cannot.
Of course we like Linux too, but Tux as a logo is pure genius - who can resist asking what the cute penguin is?
- the kernel
- Most of the Apache projects, Xerces and Xalan are almost entirely maintain by IBM employees
- KDE usability
And that's just places where I've seen IBM email addresses. They do a lot, especially in Apache, it's just very easy to forget as they don't trumpet it like some other companies do.
Also, it's well known that students who start using computers early and often are those people who don't need a dissertation on double-clicking in order to get "online" later in life:-).
Sorry, this program stinks. The money would have been much better spent on subsidies for students to buy their own computers, rather than arbitrarily handing out laptops that the kids may, or may not want. Considering that many schools already have desktop computers students can use, and I'd guess many kids have computers at home, why bother giving them a third? If the problem is that they aren't available inside the classroom all the time, then for students who actually want that, being able to buy laptops very cheaply would at least mean they could use a PC if they wanted to. I know if this had happened at my school, it would have driven me insane - simply switching between the Mac keyboard and the PC keyboard at home and school all the time would have been a nightmare. It would have irritated some of my slower-typing friends too.
The Maine government has gone about this totally the wrong way. There is no good reason for all the machines to even be the same, and considering that you can get cheap PC laptops that fulfill all the needs of the non-multimedia-using students just as well, grossly overspent too.
If you don't like the BitKeeper license, then don't use BitKeeper. When you get down to the basics, it's the same damn issue.
It's not the same issue - the GPL stops you from taking away other peoples freedoms, (free) BitKeeper stops you from working on projects based on a seemingly arbitrary set of conditions that may or may not change at any point. The restrictions on the GPL are there in order to benefit everybody. The restrictions on BitKeeper are there to benefit McVoy.
Note that I don't necessarily have an opinion either way on this, other than perhaps RMS would be better advised spending his figuring out a way for us all to get paid to write free software.
X-Windows is never going to cut it in the desktop world.
X-Windows is going to totally kick ass in the desktop world. Network transparency is the BIGGEST deal ever. Why?
You can run thin clients - for corporates this is a good thing, as it means they get control of their own machines again. Thin client setups are easier to administer, and can work out cheaper than having thousands of breakable PCs that have to be upgraded by hand every few years.
People can try out Linux with only an X server. No really, I've done this several times for people on IRC - they install a Windows X server and I launch a few apps to them to play with. It's a first taste, and often gets them interested. It's how I started
People can "swap" apps between machines on home networks. Well, OK, right now xmove is slightly broken, but the XFree developers are definately considering repairing it and then integrating it into X. Let's say you have 3 computers. One of them has a music setup, as a member of your family is a musician. Another is in the lounge, and another is in a bedroom. You're working on a document in the study, when your eldest daughter wants to come in and write some bangin' tuneage. No problem, you just click in the control button in the window and "Move screen" it to the computer in the lounge, where you can talk to your wife at the same time. A few hours later, she wants to watch TV, so you move again to the bedroom. No need to restart the app. This is easy with X, near impossible with anything else.
You can have logins within a window. XNest lets you do this easily. Can Windows or MacOS do this? No, I think not.
Dude, X-Windows is going to cut up the desktop market. Network transparency is useful to everybody, it's just we've never really had it before so nobody can think of why it's useful to them.
The desktop space however doesn't have a head-penguin and it really shows.
I would say that Havoc Pennington is stepping in to fill that gap. His standardization work over at freedesktop.org is uniting the desktops where it matter (in protocols/schemas) at a fantastic rate. The technologies they are producing tend to be more powerful than anything that came before as well, as it's a bunch of smart people from all the desktop projects talking about it together.
You don't need one famous charismatic leader - you need somebody who Gets Stuff Done (tm) and regardless of what you think of Metacity or GNOME2, Havoc is getting stuff done.
How? Stick to standards, and separate interface from function.
Fair enough. That's easier now than it was, a lot of business apps are pretty old and written at a time when there weren't really any standards. Today we have stuff like Qt, Java, wxWindows, Mozilla etc that can abstract the OS away to a large degree.
Because you run windows apps with wine by typing "wine app.exe" - the actual exe file itself never passes through the kernel, so never has UNIX security enforced.
the obvious solution would be not to run WINE as root. The filesystem permissions should prevent excessive damage.
Excessive damage to what? The application binaries and data, which can be replaced in hours? Or your home directory full of work, some of which might never be replaced?
I swear when I read the article earlier today (It was posted on Desktoplinux and NewsForge already), that the guy said that by default, "/" was mounted a Z:.
CodeWeavers Wine and WineHQ CVS setup their initial configuration differently I think. You can alter what drives are mapped to what easily enough in the config file, or using the configuration GUI.
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Why bother having a GUI itself, when there's no display? Why is this better than having some admin apps that use X, so use the display system of whatever computer you happen to be at, as opposed to running a GUI that will mostly not be seen.
Of course, console based administration is fine, too - but, Apple is about making things simple, even if you weren't raised a systems administrator. And contrary to Microsoft, their definition of "easy" doesn't correlate with the level of insecurity the system has.
Not sure I can agree with that. Microsofts systems except in a few rare cases are not really inherantly insecure, the insecurity comes from the fact that untrained people are acting as admins, and don't really know what they're doing. So they forget to update, they run more services than they should, and so on and so forth.
I don't believe a GUI, regardless of which megacorp made it, can replace proper training. If anything OS X Server will kind of have the same problem, as people will say "ah, if I use MacOS I won't have to think" - oops, that extra service you were running just got rooted.
Isn't testing OS X vs Linux on Apple hardware kind of giving OS X an unfair advantage as Apple know the ins and outs of their proprietary hardware so can throw in all kinds of optimizations?
I'd be more interested to see Darwin/x86 go against Linux for web serving, especially if you throw in the Tux kernel module web server (good for performance).
Why do you dislike Linux so much? I haven't tried FreeBSD so I don't know why its users are so loyal. Considering it's lack of hardware support/ease of use compared to Linux, what makes it so much better?
Umm, a streaming server for a closed and proprietary media format.....
What about OpenPlay [apple.com]
And a project that appears to have been abandoned (the last newsletter says Happy new year 2000)?
Darwin is great for OSX developers because it lets you look into the source of OSX and see how it works. It's not particularly useful as an x86 platform
Don't confuse OS X with Darwin. We already know how most of OS X works, although it has some neat stuff it's hardly revolutionary tech wise. Considering that Darwin itself isn't all that useful except perhaps to help improve OS X (a proprietary product) I'm left wondering why it's released in the first place.
Darwin itself is just the kernel, some drivers, some tools (mostly bsd and gnu) and a few bits and bobs like NetInfo. Large parts aren't actually BSD however, like the microkernelness, and they have their own IO APIs (IOKit).
MacOS X is then everything else - not just Aqua as some suggest, but Quartz, Aqua, all the utilities/programs (finder, mac ui, control center), the iApps, Cocoa, Carbon etc. In fact, virtually everything that you need to have a useful OS.
From what I've seen so far, it seems that Darwin/x86 is at about the same level that Linux was in terms of features/hardware support in 1993.
Also, what is the hardware support like?
We've never needed one, but I wonder. There's a lot of bad stuff going down in the tech world lately. Bad laws especially, but also good-to-honest corruption in the government (Microsoft political pressure etc). And of course you have shady working practices now, which wasn't always the case.
I wonder what would happen if we did organize a union. Most big unions ensure their members are happy through the threat of strike. Well, that wouldn't work too well for the IT industry, as there tend not to be many of us in most companies, perhaps some sys admins and some programmers. And like I said, the issues tend to be more ones that affect us all as an industry, as opposed to single organizations.
Just imagine if the US govt passed whichever mad law it is that would outlaw Linux (CCTPDA??). If I remember correctly, Europe has an equivalent in the works. I think most of us, even those who didn't use Linux, would be pretty pissed. What would happen to the Western economy if parts of the net were sort of shut down for a few days? I think they'd get the picture.
Right now of course this is just paranoid speculation, but in the future, who knows. We may suddenly find we need to start standing up for the tech industry.
On the contrary, FreeNet is used by a lot of Chinese people as it's a good way of distributing information without being traced. Right now freedom of speech may not be a problem for us, but we're lucky.
That's the whole point. If people could figure out what was in your data store, then the concept of free speech would be meaningless as you could be forced to hand over lists of content and then have it removed. Having the owner not able to see is the only way of guaranteeing that content cannot be deleted.
2) My files aren't shared permanently. If nobody requests the files I injected, they are thrown out after a while, even if my node is online 24/7. That's just plain stupid.
If you run a non-transient node this isn't the case, but this is like running a web server, so you need a 24/7 machine with lots of bandwidth. If you publish data that is popular, and then go offline however, that data is still available - it's more like the web than Gnutella.
Although of course you could use it for trading porn/mp3s, in reality the upload/propagate nature of it means that it's not simply a case of "publishing" a folder, you have to explicitly upload files to it. Due to the lack of a built in search protocol (hence the existance of search engines for it) you'd be much better off using Kazaa.
FreeNet is essentially the bulletproof P2P data exchange. It's practically impossible to destroy, or track down people who are on it. It is NOT designed for swapping MP3s or porn for those who have got the wrong idea, it's purpose is (as the name implies) to guarantee freedom of speech by allowing totally anonymous yet scalable publishing.
Scalable? Yes, one of the more interesting aspects of Freenet is it's intelligent caching and retrieval system. This isn't Gnutella, when you request a file it traverses the nodes being cached at each level. Therefore, the more a file is requested, the more distributed it becomes and the easier it becomes to get to - the opposite of the web.
FreeNet takes the form of a web for new users, you can "surf" the FreeWeb, and there was at one point a google-style search engine for it, I have no idea if that's the case. Some of the problems I remember were that it was often hard or impossible to reach certain pages as they hadn't propagated enough to be found before the timeouts were hit, and even then the timeouts were pretty high (like 2 minutes). On the more popular sites the owners would have to manually request it from different parts of the FreeNet in order to make it accessible.
Another problem was that because nothing can ever be deleted from the FreeNet once published, it was hard to do news/blog style sites: at the time they used JavaScript date based redirects, I think that shows how long ago I used it. Suffice to say that I'll be trying this release with interest.
Not quite - for years Linux has been promising an open, free and flexible desktop. So far we're getting there, but we never gave a timeframe for it. Nobody ever said (or nobody who knew what they were talking about anyway) - we'll be done in 3 years. It'll never be "done", that's just the nature of it.
It should also be noted that making a totally flexible desktop with pluggable UIs is a hell of a lot harder than simply providing one. For instance, the vFolder menu system is generated dynamically depending on how the distro/user/desktop wishes the menu to operate. Everything has to be standardized, because you've got at least 4 or 5 desktops that people want to use, so your technologies have to accomodate that.
Finally, note that Apple have thrown far more resources into the desktop than RedHat/SuSE/volunteers have combined. That's life - the Linux desktop is still under construction. It will be really really great, one day. Promise.
Amazingly, it doesn't seem to sacrifice any flexibility or power for its' simplicity. When Linux makes me as productive as OS X, I'll go back in a second. Until then, you can pry my iBook out of my cold dead fingers.
No, you sacrifice lots of flexibility. If we ignore dodgy 3rd party hacks, OS X has no flexibility in its UI at all, it can't even be themed, let alone change the window manager etc. If you find the defaults work great for you, fantastic, but don't confuse that with flexibility. And of course, OS X is not free - you use it now and life is good yes? But you are slowly being locked into it. You're assuming that it'd take no effort to switch back to Linux, but what are you going to do with all the data generated by Mac only apps? I dunno, beats me.
Until then though, you can help us out by not whinging about things that ceased to be relevant years ago - I've never had to alter the XFree config files, it's all automatic, and is getting more automatic all the time. The long term aim of the X developers is to eliminate the config files entirely. You've made your choice because you think the Mac is easier than Linux, but I have the opposite opinion, yet you don't see me saying "when OS X is themable and has a pluggable WM then I'll switch in an instant" do you? It's not helpful.
But I don't have, and don't intend to get QuickTime, crossover or not. The Two Towers trailor played better in the DivX version I found anyway, so is there a divx of this advert anywhere? Does a QT Pro owner care to convert it?
I seem to recall reading Jeremy White of codeweavers saying that the Sherman act prevented them from tying a non monopoly product to a monopoly product. If they explictly block people who don't use Windows, isn't that an anti-trust violation?
Of course we like Linux too, but Tux as a logo is pure genius - who can resist asking what the cute penguin is?
- the kernel
- Most of the Apache projects, Xerces and Xalan are almost entirely maintain by IBM employees
- KDE usability
And that's just places where I've seen IBM email addresses. They do a lot, especially in Apache, it's just very easy to forget as they don't trumpet it like some other companies do.
Sorry, this program stinks. The money would have been much better spent on subsidies for students to buy their own computers, rather than arbitrarily handing out laptops that the kids may, or may not want. Considering that many schools already have desktop computers students can use, and I'd guess many kids have computers at home, why bother giving them a third? If the problem is that they aren't available inside the classroom all the time, then for students who actually want that, being able to buy laptops very cheaply would at least mean they could use a PC if they wanted to. I know if this had happened at my school, it would have driven me insane - simply switching between the Mac keyboard and the PC keyboard at home and school all the time would have been a nightmare. It would have irritated some of my slower-typing friends too.
The Maine government has gone about this totally the wrong way. There is no good reason for all the machines to even be the same, and considering that you can get cheap PC laptops that fulfill all the needs of the non-multimedia-using students just as well, grossly overspent too.
It's not the same issue - the GPL stops you from taking away other peoples freedoms, (free) BitKeeper stops you from working on projects based on a seemingly arbitrary set of conditions that may or may not change at any point. The restrictions on the GPL are there in order to benefit everybody. The restrictions on BitKeeper are there to benefit McVoy.
Note that I don't necessarily have an opinion either way on this, other than perhaps RMS would be better advised spending his figuring out a way for us all to get paid to write free software.
X-Windows is going to totally kick ass in the desktop world. Network transparency is the BIGGEST deal ever. Why?
You can run thin clients - for corporates this is a good thing, as it means they get control of their own machines again. Thin client setups are easier to administer, and can work out cheaper than having thousands of breakable PCs that have to be upgraded by hand every few years.
People can try out Linux with only an X server. No really, I've done this several times for people on IRC - they install a Windows X server and I launch a few apps to them to play with. It's a first taste, and often gets them interested. It's how I started
People can "swap" apps between machines on home networks. Well, OK, right now xmove is slightly broken, but the XFree developers are definately considering repairing it and then integrating it into X. Let's say you have 3 computers. One of them has a music setup, as a member of your family is a musician. Another is in the lounge, and another is in a bedroom. You're working on a document in the study, when your eldest daughter wants to come in and write some bangin' tuneage. No problem, you just click in the control button in the window and "Move screen" it to the computer in the lounge, where you can talk to your wife at the same time. A few hours later, she wants to watch TV, so you move again to the bedroom. No need to restart the app. This is easy with X, near impossible with anything else.
You can have logins within a window. XNest lets you do this easily. Can Windows or MacOS do this? No, I think not.
Dude, X-Windows is going to cut up the desktop market. Network transparency is useful to everybody, it's just we've never really had it before so nobody can think of why it's useful to them.
I would say that Havoc Pennington is stepping in to fill that gap. His standardization work over at freedesktop.org is uniting the desktops where it matter (in protocols/schemas) at a fantastic rate. The technologies they are producing tend to be more powerful than anything that came before as well, as it's a bunch of smart people from all the desktop projects talking about it together.
You don't need one famous charismatic leader - you need somebody who Gets Stuff Done (tm) and regardless of what you think of Metacity or GNOME2, Havoc is getting stuff done.
So you don't want to (cough) interface with dwarves, but fruit is OK?
That's not very consistant, is it!
Fair enough. That's easier now than it was, a lot of business apps are pretty old and written at a time when there weren't really any standards. Today we have stuff like Qt, Java, wxWindows, Mozilla etc that can abstract the OS away to a large degree.
Because you run windows apps with wine by typing "wine app.exe" - the actual exe file itself never passes through the kernel, so never has UNIX security enforced.
Excessive damage to what? The application binaries and data, which can be replaced in hours? Or your home directory full of work, some of which might never be replaced?
CodeWeavers Wine and WineHQ CVS setup their initial configuration differently I think. You can alter what drives are mapped to what easily enough in the config file, or using the configuration GUI.