You want to do your scans from another machine (or use something like 'lsof -i') if you really want to find out what ports are "open" - in the usual sense of being open for access from another machine.
The ports you mention are all, I believe, only open for local access - i.e. communication between processes on the same machine. Not open to access from machines on the LAN, let alone on the Internet.
I don't know this for sure about port 427 since it doesn't seem to be open on my OS X machine. But take port 631 for example. It is used for printing services but by default it doesn't allow access even from other machines on the same LAN. It is possible, of course, to open it for LAN access - but that isn't the default. By default, OS X is indeed, locked up, as it should be for the majority of users.
Mac OS X uses micro kernel technology. This provides better memory protection between applications, and the ability to sperate the OS into different components and levels. This becomes key when updating the OS. Most updates, since it does not involve the micro kernel, a complete system restart isn't necessary. The micro kernel will continue to run while the rest of the OS is patched in restarted, reducing start up time for kernel updates.
While it is true that OS X includes Mach technology, it is actually a much modified mixture of BSD and Mach and along the way, one of the things that got abandoned was the idea of the micro-kernel. Current OS X does not use a microkernel in the usual sense - it is a monolithic kernel. It does however have some clever kernel extension mechanisms.
Here's a quote from a Usenix paper by Louis Gerbarg:
xnu is not a traditional microkernel as its Mach heritage might imply. Over the years various people have tried methods of speeding up microkernels, including collocation (MkLinux), and optimized messaging mechanisms (L4)[microperf]. Since Mac OS X was not intended to work as a multi-server, and a crash of a BSD server was equivalent to a system crash from a user perspective the advantages of protecting Mach from BSD were negligible. Rather than simple collocation, message passing was short circuited by having BSD directly call Mach functions. While the abstractions are maintained within the kernel at source level, the kernel is in fact monolithic.
As someone who often "shops" for open source software for individual or corporate use, I must disagree. I don't want more marketing if that is defined as you describe it - emphasizing the positive, hiding the negative. We get enough of that sort of thing with commercial software.
I agree completely that a common deficiency in open source projects is that the software is not described adequately for those who are shopping around for a solution.
But the description of a piece of open source software ought to be as informative as possible. That means giving as objective as possible information about the strengths and weaknesses of the software. If softwareA is better at taskFoo, then the descriotion should say so. Perhaps it should also indicate whether the developers plan to rectify that weakness in the near future.
Perhaps you don't realize that OS X can be configured to use/etc/hosts exactly as most UNIX variants do. It's an option. It is true that OS X is not "the same as BSD, Solaris, or Linux" but then BSD is not the same as Solaris or Linux, Solaris is not the same as Linux, etc. Each UNIX variant has some differences that you need to learn.
Besides, this is a stupid device. Using the FM broadcast band for short-range transmission is obsolete technology.
Yes and so is RS232 but both are useful to interface to legacy equipment. I.e. how otherwise can you get a signal to a car stereo that has no input jacks available?
Answer those three questions and you'll most likely arrive at the same conclusion I did.
What - that Apple is a company and that at least one of the goals of the company is to make a profit? I think there are very good reasons why they have not open-sourced what they consider to be a competitive advantage - the GUI parts of OS X.
I also wish they would release the source of more of OS X. But I don't particularly care if they make it open source - I would be happy to have the source for the GUI even if I couldn't do anything other than look at it. It would be very useful for troubleshooting.
do yourself a FAVOR and download Cocoa Browser before you even lay down a single line of Objective-C. The ONLY way to access the frameworks references.
I much prefer
AppKiDo since it allows searching and it shows you a list of all methods of a class (including those from super classes) as well as a list of just those provided by the class itself.
The Apple OS is slick and beautiful, but may not be worth the extra $100+ every N months.
Yeah, when I was poor, I "preferred" to walk everywhere. Now I can afford a bus pass - and a car! And the $129 for Panther will be money well spent.
Re:This will be another solid update
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
Why don't you write an "open source" widget that will allow people to replace that ugly-ass "brush metal" theme they keep sticking on their desktop and let us know how "frinedly" they are about that?
It's been done - by Unsanity: metallifizer
Well, it's not open source, but it is free. And Apple hasn't had any complaints.
In 1974, Richard Stallman, another hacker, added a macro feature to the TECO display-editing mode.
[...]
In 1976, Guy Steele began an effort to unify the many divergent macro sets. The project was completed by Stallman, who also wrote facilities for extension and self-documentation. The resulting program was called EMACS.
[...]
Gosling Emacs, the first Emacs-like editor to run on Unix, was written by James Gosling in 1981. It was written in C and used a stripped-down version of Lisp, known as Mocklisp, as an extension language.
In 1984, Stallman began writing a new emacs implementation, GNU Emacs, which became the first program in the nascent GNU project.
Gosling initially allowed Gosling Emacs to be freely redistributed, but later sold it to UniPress. Since Gosling had permitted its free redistribution, Richard Stallman used some Gosling Emacs code in the initial version of GNU Emacs. However, since UniPress was now selling Gosling Emacs (which it renamed Unipress Emacs) as a commercial product, it forced Stallman to stop distributing Gosling Emacs source code. Thus all Gosling Emacs code was removed from GNU Emacs in version 16.56.
contributors got a free copy
on
Mac OS X Hints
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· Score: 1
First of all, Rob Griffiths (author of the book) puts in a huge amount of effort everyday in maintaining the site. He moderates submissions, usually testing them, rewording the explanations, and adding his own comments.
And Rob did email the contributor of each hint asking for permission to include it in the book. And he sent an autographed copy of the book to each of these contributors. As one of the contributors of a few hints that made it into the book, I feel this was very generous.
And even though I've been following the site almost since it began, I learned several new things from the book.
It's funny that Apple set up so many preferences/features that they simply never put a convenient UI on.
Well, it takes considerably more work (design and coding) to have a UI.
My take on this is the reverse - it is great that they make it possible to tweak so much of the system by having parameters in plist files instead of just hard-coding them.
There is a very nice article by Jonathan Rentzsch with more details on the way credit card payments work and how Apple could (in theory) reduce the costs more than they do now: Credit Card Micropayments
Fink is a very slow way to run Linux applications on OSX
You seem to be implying that fink-ported apps are running under an emulator of some sort. Not at all. Fink merely handles the (usually small) changes to make the apps run under OS X and X11.
no need to mention that OSX apps in native OSX boot are much slower than Linux apps in native Linux boot on the same PPC.
Which apps are you comparing here? The OS X version of Word versus the Linux version of Word? The OS X version of PhotoShop versus the Linux version of PhotoShop? The OS X version of iMovie versus the Linux version of iMovie? Don't tell me about the "equivalents" - you have to compare the same program if you are going to talk sensibly about speed. An "equivalent" program often turns out to not be quite so sophisticated and speed versus functionality is one common trade-off.
Tracy McNeal is my coworker and so I am in an unique position to assert her existence.
You mean that there are only the two of you working at Xerox?
mySQL is often just for use by other software
on
OS X Hacks
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've seen questions (e.g. on http://forums.macosxhints.com) many times from people who are installing mySQL merely because it is used by some other software that they want to use. They have no intention of defining their own tables, composing their own SQL queries, etc. They just need mySQL to be there for the other software to use.
There is an analogous situation with the C compiler. On Mac OS X, the C compiler is installed as part of the Developer Tools and that is easy enough- but suppose it was harder to do. Then you might be thinking that anyone who has trouble with installation isn't likely to need a C compiler. But again, I see lots of people asking questions about compiling this or that package who haven't the first clue what a C compiler is - they just want to get the FooSnarz program (available as source) running on OS X.
Sure, it's easy to imagine figuring out the protocol used for doing the purchase. But what about playing the songs that you have purchased? They are in a protected format (m4p) and only iTunes is able to play them. Only iTunes is able to transfer them to your iPod. So there's quite a bit of work left to do after you figure out the purchasing protocol!
The sarcasm in the parent post seems to me to indicate a lack of understanding of the issue here.
What is being touted as a new feature in Panther is switching to another user on the console - using GUI applications, not merely the remote login capability (text-only apps) that has been a part of all UNIXen (including OS X) from the beginning.
That quote totally sums up how I feel about macs vs windows after years of working tech support, and explains why I still use windows today.
If there ever was justification for such an attitude (mostly based on ignorance of a less common platform), it is certainly not justified "today" when the UNIX-level tools of Mac OS X provide you with so many opportunities for troubleshooting.
Application vs Window. I don't remember if this was mentioned, but this has always annoyed me about Macs. In windows, if I close Word or some other program by clicking on the "close" button on the top right of the window, it closes. On a Mac, the window closes but the application stays open.
To close a window, you use the Window-close control.
To quit an application, you use the Application's "Quit" menu-item.
Why is this confusing?
Maybe it's annoying if you have grown used to the Windows behaviour where you are forced to use the Window-close control since there is no uniform keyboard shortcut for quitting an application. On Macs, there is: Cmd-Q
Perhaps this is also related to another key difference: on a Mac, there is (usually) only one instance of an application running. Double-click on a document belonging to that application and it just opens another window. On Windows, you never know if it will start a new instance of the application or not.
Excerpt from 'man ifconfig' (after 10.2.4 update):
ether Another name for the lladdr parameter.
lladdr addr
Set the link-level address on an interface. This can be used to
e.g. set a new MAC address on an ethernet interface, though the
mechanism used is not ethernet-specific. The address addr is
specified as a series of colon-separated hex digits. If the
interface is already up when this option is used, it will be
briefly brought down and then brought back up again in order to
ensure that the receive filter in the underlying ethernet hard-
ware is properly reprogrammed.
@m administration database is different from mainstream UNIX systems made integrating the Macs into my home and work networks much more work than a Linux machine.
It is true that it is different by default but you can easily change it to use the flat files you are used to if you want: man lookupd
Apple's software package management is worse than even that of Windows.
Not sure what it is that you are complaining about but for applications you don't need any package management - just drag the app where you want it. For system-supplied libraries etc you don't need to worry about it - Software Update does everything. For ports of other UNIX software, fink (with apt-get) works very well.
I can get better functionality and more software for less money with Linux.
Less money for sure. But more functionality? There are many commercial apps on OS X that are far more functional than what is available on Linux. Of course I'm heavily weighting usability as an important part of "functional". And "more software" is not necessarily better - one excellent app is much more valuable than 10 good ones.
I suspect that he meant "of every non-void function".
And I've done that sort of thing on a big project but also just gotten rid of such spurious complaints via grep -v on the log file. And I did find some functions where the return value was being ignored when it definitely shouldn't have been!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know this for sure about port 427 since it doesn't seem to be open on my OS X machine. But take port 631 for example. It is used for printing services but by default it doesn't allow access even from other machines on the same LAN. It is possible, of course, to open it for LAN access - but that isn't the default. By default, OS X is indeed, locked up, as it should be for the majority of users.
Nutch: An Open Source Search Engine
I agree completely that a common deficiency in open source projects is that the software is not described adequately for those who are shopping around for a solution. But the description of a piece of open source software ought to be as informative as possible. That means giving as objective as possible information about the strengths and weaknesses of the software. If softwareA is better at taskFoo, then the descriotion should say so. Perhaps it should also indicate whether the developers plan to rectify that weakness in the near future.
Perhaps you don't realize that OS X can be configured to use /etc/hosts exactly as most UNIX variants do. It's an option.
It is true that OS X is not "the same as BSD, Solaris, or Linux" but then BSD is not the same as Solaris or Linux, Solaris is not the same as Linux, etc. Each UNIX variant has some differences that you need to learn.
Yes and so is RS232 but both are useful to interface to legacy equipment. I.e. how otherwise can you get a signal to a car stereo that has no input jacks available?
What - that Apple is a company and that at least one of the goals of the company is to make a profit? I think there are very good reasons why they have not open-sourced what they consider to be a competitive advantage - the GUI parts of OS X.
I also wish they would release the source of more of OS X. But I don't particularly care if they make it open source - I would be happy to have the source for the GUI even if I couldn't do anything other than look at it. It would be very useful for troubleshooting.
I much prefer AppKiDo since it allows searching and it shows you a list of all methods of a class (including those from super classes) as well as a list of just those provided by the class itself.
Yeah, when I was poor, I "preferred" to walk everywhere. Now I can afford a bus pass - and a car! And the $129 for Panther will be money well spent.
It's been done - by Unsanity: metallifizer
Well, it's not open source, but it is free. And Apple hasn't had any complaints.
The Bug Button is still available - it is one of the choices in the View menu.
This is (at best) misleading.
and from the wikipedia article on Gosling Emacs:Here's some excerpts from the wikipedia article on Emacs:
And Rob did email the contributor of each hint asking for permission to include it in the book. And he sent an autographed copy of the book to each of these contributors. As one of the contributors of a few hints that made it into the book, I feel this was very generous.
And even though I've been following the site almost since it began, I learned several new things from the book.
Well, it takes considerably more work (design and coding) to have a UI. My take on this is the reverse - it is great that they make it possible to tweak so much of the system by having parameters in plist files instead of just hard-coding them.
There is a very nice article by Jonathan Rentzsch with more details on the way credit card payments work and how Apple could (in theory) reduce the costs more than they do now: Credit Card Micropayments
You seem to be implying that fink-ported apps are running under an emulator of some sort. Not at all. Fink merely handles the (usually small) changes to make the apps run under OS X and X11.
no need to mention that OSX apps in native OSX boot are much slower than Linux apps in native Linux boot on the same PPC.
Which apps are you comparing here? The OS X version of Word versus the Linux version of Word? The OS X version of PhotoShop versus the Linux version of PhotoShop? The OS X version of iMovie versus the Linux version of iMovie? Don't tell me about the "equivalents" - you have to compare the same program if you are going to talk sensibly about speed. An "equivalent" program often turns out to not be quite so sophisticated and speed versus functionality is one common trade-off.
You mean that there are only the two of you working at Xerox?
I've seen questions (e.g. on http://forums.macosxhints.com) many times from people who are installing mySQL merely because it is used by some other software that they want to use. They have no intention of defining their own tables, composing their own SQL queries, etc. They just need mySQL to be there for the other software to use.
There is an analogous situation with the C compiler. On Mac OS X, the C compiler is installed as part of the Developer Tools and that is easy enough- but suppose it was harder to do. Then you might be thinking that anyone who has trouble with installation isn't likely to need a C compiler. But again, I see lots of people asking questions about compiling this or that package who haven't the first clue what a C compiler is - they just want to get the FooSnarz program (available as source) running on OS X.
Sure, it's easy to imagine figuring out the protocol used for doing the purchase.
But what about playing the songs that you have purchased? They are in a protected format (m4p) and only iTunes is able to play them. Only iTunes is able to transfer them to your iPod.
So there's quite a bit of work left to do after you figure out the purchasing protocol!
What is being touted as a new feature in Panther is switching to another user on the console - using GUI applications, not merely the remote login capability (text-only apps) that has been a part of all UNIXen (including OS X) from the beginning.
If there ever was justification for such an attitude (mostly based on ignorance of a less common platform), it is certainly not justified "today" when the UNIX-level tools of Mac OS X provide you with so many opportunities for troubleshooting.
To quit an application, you use the Application's "Quit" menu-item.
Why is this confusing?
Maybe it's annoying if you have grown used to the Windows behaviour where you are forced to use the Window-close control since there is no uniform keyboard shortcut for quitting an application.
On Macs, there is: Cmd-Q
Perhaps this is also related to another key difference: on a Mac, there is (usually) only one instance of an application running. Double-click on a document belonging to that application and it just opens another window. On Windows, you never know if it will start a new instance of the application or not.
Excerpt from 'man ifconfig' (after 10.2.4 update):
ether Another name for the lladdr parameter.
lladdr addr
Set the link-level address on an interface. This can be used to
e.g. set a new MAC address on an ethernet interface, though the
mechanism used is not ethernet-specific. The address addr is
specified as a series of colon-separated hex digits. If the
interface is already up when this option is used, it will be
briefly brought down and then brought back up again in order to
ensure that the receive filter in the underlying ethernet hard-
ware is properly reprogrammed.
It is true that it is different by default but you can easily change it to use the flat files you are used to if you want: man lookupd
Apple's software package management is worse than even that of Windows.
Not sure what it is that you are complaining about but for applications you don't need any package management - just drag the app where you want it. For system-supplied libraries etc you don't need to worry about it - Software Update does everything. For ports of other UNIX software, fink (with apt-get) works very well.
I can get better functionality and more software for less money with Linux.
Less money for sure. But more functionality? There are many commercial apps on OS X that are far more functional than what is available on Linux. Of course I'm heavily weighting usability as an important part of "functional". And "more software" is not necessarily better - one excellent app is much more valuable than 10 good ones.
I suspect that he meant "of every non-void function". And I've done that sort of thing on a big project but also just gotten rid of such spurious complaints via grep -v on the log file. And I did find some functions where the return value was being ignored when it definitely shouldn't have been!