Interesting to note is that all the engineers from The X Consortium have now been gone for almost a year, as TOG gets around to "doing something" with X.
My last month at TOG was working on the X Project Team. It gives me an interesting point of view, as AFAIR the new license was being driven by the corporate sponsors of the XPT (most of those companies you mention above), because they felt they were paying the development costs so that other companies (i.e. Linux distributors like RedHat) could "ride for free".
Too bad TOG melted down and disvolved the last part of OSF when they did, as a source release of Motif was in the works at the time!
Re:Got my ticket. 12:30 Wednesday Morning.
on
More Star Wars Hype
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· Score: 1
"I am your father" wasn't kept secret at all. The novelization came out over a month before the movie and I had already read it. Heck, the Menance novelization (by Terry Brooks... shudder!) has been out for almost 2 weeks, right?
The "stub installer" approach sucks. Sure, I installed it at work, but now I have to download the whole thing again (over a modem) to install at home.
And the "stub installer" doesn't even give me a chance to "save" the downloaded components.
So, I made some packet traces on the download the installer makes; both for "basic" (2MB) and custom/full (it claims 18MB, but only downloads 7Mb). This download technology is, like most things Apple, bizarre and non-standard.
Everything it grabs (for Windows 95/98/NT) comes from http://starwars.apple.com/us/win/. First it grabs the viseicat.idx file (1KB) and then it grabs all *or* some of the 7MB vicedata.dat file. All of the requests include in the HTTP headers this:
Authorization: Basic cXR3aW46cXRyb3g0dQ==
which works out to a username:password of qtwin:qtrox4u. However, I was able to fetch these without the authorization!
A custom/full download got the visedata.dat file with this range:
Range: bytes=32300-7086322
while a "basic" download started with this range:
Range: bytes= 770138-882640
(although I didn't trace the whole download, so I expect it grabbed several chunks of the 7MB file).
Either way, the downloaded file (visedata.dat) is all data and consumed by their installer.
This means that I can't possibly download the "whole" distribution at work and carry it home on a ZIP disk or a laptop, because the downloaded files aren't usable without going through their installer.
Like I said, this is exactly the type of stunt I expect from Apple.
> How in hell does "all the functionality in > userspace" make an OS easier to debug?
Because it means that you can run multiple copies of the "OS personality" over the microkernel. You boot a first instance of your OS as your debug platform, and then start an instance of the OS your are debugging as a process under the first instance. If it crashes, you can directly debug it, kill just the process, quickly edit-compile-restart ("reboot"), all without having to reboot the underlying computer.
IMHO, this ease of debugging is the best reason for using microkernel-like systems. And I worked on several projects doing this on top of Mach3 over the years.
(This comments apply to Mach systems in general, such as MkLinux. The last I heard, Hurd was using Utah's "Mach4" work, but I assume this debugging technique still applies to it.)
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Interesting to note is that all the engineers from The X Consortium have now been gone for almost a year, as TOG gets around to "doing something" with X.
My last month at TOG was working on the X Project Team. It gives me an interesting point of view, as AFAIR the new license was being driven by the corporate sponsors of the XPT (most of those companies you mention above), because they felt they were paying the development costs so that other companies (i.e. Linux distributors like RedHat) could "ride for free".
Too bad TOG melted down and disvolved the last part of OSF when they did, as a source release of Motif was in the works at the time!
"I am your father" wasn't kept secret at all. The novelization came out over a month before the movie and I had already read it. Heck, the Menance novelization (by Terry Brooks... shudder!) has been out for almost 2 weeks, right?
The "stub installer" approach sucks. Sure, I installed it at work, but now I have to download the whole thing again (over a modem) to install at home.
And the "stub installer" doesn't even give me a
chance to "save" the downloaded components.
So, I made some packet traces on the download the installer makes; both for "basic" (2MB) and custom/full (it claims 18MB, but only downloads 7Mb). This download technology is, like most things Apple, bizarre and non-standard.
Everything it grabs (for Windows 95/98/NT) comes from http://starwars.apple.com/us/win/. First it grabs the viseicat.idx file (1KB) and then it grabs all *or* some of the 7MB vicedata.dat file. All of the requests include in the HTTP headers this:
Authorization: Basic cXR3aW46cXRyb3g0dQ==
which works out to a username:password of qtwin:qtrox4u. However, I was able to fetch these without the authorization!
A custom/full download got the visedata.dat file
with this range:
Range: bytes=32300-7086322
while a "basic" download started with this range:
Range: bytes= 770138-882640
(although I didn't trace the whole download, so I expect it grabbed several chunks of the 7MB file).
Either way, the downloaded file (visedata.dat) is all data and consumed by their installer.
This means that I can't possibly download the "whole" distribution at work and carry it home on a ZIP disk or a laptop, because the downloaded files aren't usable without going through their installer.
Like I said, this is exactly the type of stunt I expect from Apple.
Over 10 years ago, in discussing X, Motif, and Open Look, Rob Pike said
"More and more pixels doing less and less work."
How far we've progressed.
> How in hell does "all the functionality in
> userspace" make an OS easier to debug?
Because it means that you can run multiple copies of the "OS personality" over the microkernel. You boot a first instance of your OS as your debug platform, and then start an instance of the OS your are debugging as a process under the first instance. If it crashes, you can directly debug it, kill just the process, quickly edit-compile-restart ("reboot"), all without having to reboot the underlying computer.
IMHO, this ease of debugging is the best reason for using microkernel-like systems. And I worked on several projects doing this on top of Mach3 over the years.
(This comments apply to Mach systems in general, such as MkLinux. The last I heard, Hurd was using Utah's "Mach4" work, but I assume this debugging technique still applies to it.)