> Installing software on linux is easier than on windows or osx.
Hahahahahahahaha
On OSX, 99% of application installs require one of the following: 1) mv Application.app 2) Drag application to any destination you want.
That's it.
> Either > apt-get install foobar > or find foobar in the GUI package manager/app store/software center.
That's great. Now: 1) What if the application you want to install hasn't been ported by the application maintainer (particularly smaller, less popular applications)? 2) What if the VERSION of the application hasn't been ported yet (I regularly need some new version of software but the update isn't posted to the repository for months) 3) What if the application you're trying to install is - horrors - not open-source? 4) What if you're using a somewhat older distribution and packages aren't being updated often or at all anymore? (And "older" in this case may mean only two years. Or less.) 5) What if you want to install multiple versions of an application? 6) What if you want multiple instances of the application, or to control where the application is installed? 7) What if you want to install two different pieces of software that have irresolvable library conflicts (possibly due to software not being updated on a regular basis) 8) End up in a broken state because package management and extreme library sharing like this is inherently more fragile? 9) Don't want to wait for 18 different pieces of software to be installed/updated just because you want to update your media player app?
I run into these problems on a regular basis. It drives me absolutely insane.
That's probably another use, but I really don't think that's the main place where it'd be useful. I DREAM of being able to just download an application archive, extract it *anywhere I want*, and just run it. Just use it, without having to worry. Any application - not the apps (and versions) that some distribution maintainer has gotten around to porting to my flavor.
Maybe not, but it's something that a number of people that want to use Linux want to do. Including me. For the life of me I can't understand why people would resist this. If this takes off and works as well as advertised it will save all of us a tremendous amount of headaches.
App portability and dependency problems has been one of the Achilles Heels of Linux since, well, forever. We laughed at Windows for DLL-hell, and if anything package managers seem like the ugly kludge way to resolve it to me. I wonder how many tens or hundreds of thousands of man-hours have been lost dealing with these sorts of issues. It's by far the #1 thing that's prevented me from using Linux for those purposes, and I'd REALLY like to use Linux (though there are others). Hell, it's the main thing that's kept me from taking Linux seriously outside the server room. Particularly since people really don't seem to get why this is a problem.
- I should be able to install an application QUICKLY and easily. There's no reason why "installation" should be more complicated than "copying/extracting the binaries to wherever I want them to go". - I should not be dependent on some third party to get around to porting each version of software to my flavor of Linux. When a new version of Wireshark or VLC or whatever software comes out, I should be able to install it *quickly and simply* without waiting on package maintainers to get around to it (even if some are very responsive) - Along with the above, I shouldn't be in a state where I can no longer easily install applications because I'm using a somewhat older distribution (and packages are no longer being maintained for that version) - Although the option should be there, it should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER be considered "acceptable" to expect users to compile an application to install it (and all the potential headaches of getting that to work, including hacking make files, dealing with dependencies, patching the software, actually doing C++ debugging, etc).
Balloon up my applications with static libraries. Please. The trade-off in system administration headache would pay for itself 100s of times over.
"You are missing his point. On a non-deduplicated system if one block goes bad you lose one file, on a deduplicated system you can lose any number of files due to one bad block."
This is true, but he was saying "This is the opposite of RAID...it squeezes every bit of redundancy out of your data". Like having random duplicate copies of files scattered around a filesystem was a redundancy mechanism that is somehow on-par with RAID, and so enabling dedupe means that you have eliminated a serious data redundancy mechanism. It's true that it might be a higher-impact loss when you lose a single file (and require more restores or mean more users will be impacted), but it's not a situation where you've suddenly killed your data backup plan and lost all your data. You're just not going to be using random duplicate copies of files on your FS in this way.
"Personally, I'd be _terrified_ of using dedup for primary storage. What this does is exactly the opposite of RAID - it squeezes every last bit of redundancy out of your data, and makes everything dependent upon the integrity of your blockpool database. Loose a single blocklet and you stand to lose _all_ of your data. "
Dedupe reduces multiple copies of the same data *on the same storage*
I think you're implying that having - probably purely at random - multiple copies of some files on the same FS is somehow a proper backup/redundancy strategy. It sounds like you're saying that WITHOUT dedupe, if a file got corrupted you'd at least be able to go restore it from some other copy of the file. I can't imagine how this is true - you can't rely on chance copies of multiple files to be able to recover from a file corruption. That's crazy. With or without dedupe you better have BACKUPS of the data on some other storage.
Maybe you mean that if something gets corrupted in some of the deduped data that you'll lose ALL dedupe data (so maybe half of your filesystem or something). Most dedupe technologies don't work that way - if corruption occurs it will impact the actual data or possibly file that was affected (and obviously each copy of that data throughout the FS). But not more than that.
The NS20 goes head-to-head with that NetApp box, so I'm not sure if that's true in this case (need to be fortune 10 to afford it). And from what I read a couple of days ago, it's the most commonly sold NAS product in this class...which is why I thought it was weird not to include it in the review. I'm curious what they would have said about it.
I can't say that I've ever heard dedup percentage of 95% related to the NS series, which is very similar to the products in this article (NAS/SAN server that does dedupe on live data that lives on the array). Maybe you're confusing with products like Data Domain or Avamar or something?
Odd that if they reviewed this class of products they didn't review the most common deduping NAS/SAN applicance - the EMC NS-series (particularly NS20).
Although there are many conspiracy theorists out there, I'd say most people who have done basic research on "The Buzzer" have come to agree that it is a station used for Ionosphere research. Some details:
- Its frequency (4.625Mhz) is mentioned specifically in several scientific papers. One paper discusses a technique for ionosphere research using doppler shift measurements reflected from a high-frequency radio wave. (http://elpub.wdcb.ru/journals/rjes/v10/2007ES000227/2.shtml) - This paper refers to the signal as coming from a "stable basic generator", sending a carrier wave from a standard radio transmitter. - Several (supposed) radio experts have said that the signal being sent is the kind that would make sense for this kind of research - the tone sent at a fixed strength and amplitude/pitch, with a regular cutoff and regular repeat would be useful to measure doppler shift and falloff at the edge of the signal. - The paper above was authored (partially) by "S V Anisimov". - Sergei V Anisimov is the senior director of the "Borok Geophysical Observatory" (http://wwwbrk.adm.yar.ru/main_e.html), which does, among other things, Ionosphere research. - Borok Geophysical Observatory is based not tremendously far from the CONFIRMED location of the UVB-76 transmitter. It is easy to imagine that they could have an agreement with the owners of this transmitter (the russian government?) or own it themselves, and be using it for this research.
Conspiracy nuts will say that this is just a cover story.
It doesn't explain why the voice messages occur occasionally (some have theorized that having the random tones of a human voice can be used for other doppler measurements). And even if this research is occurring, it doesn't mean that this transmitter isn't used for other purposes as well. But nobody seems to mention any of this. The dead man's switch theory of world destruction is way more exciting, I guess.
A tag on the post implies it, but I thought it'd be worthwhile to mention specifically that this applies to Windows and Linux, but NOT Macintosh.
Personally, although the Flash plugin for Mac is dramatically less speedy than on Windows, I've never had stability issues with it. I've never once, in the last (...6 years?) had it crash and/or take the browser with it.
My only real problem with Firefox has been the bizarrely high CPU utilization and tremendous memory leaks, neither of which are caused by extensions or plugins. For years now if I use the browser for a few hours or more, opening 4-15 tabs, it'll start using 30-50% of CPU. Certain sites seem to trigger it more than others, but it's not consistent. The problem persists even if I close all tabs, and happens even with Flash and other plugins/extensions disabled. In fact, it's hovering around 20% CPU usage right now and 600MB RAM consumed, and the only thing I have open is this comment window. I've had this problem now on 5 different Macs and various profiles over the years. CPU problem doesn't happen on Windows (but the memory usage problem does). And it's driven me to Chrome for the last 4 months, where at least memory is released/CPU drops when I close a tab (kill a process).
Nobody said it was brand new (although I think it'd be a pretty big stretch to call the RAZR a "smartphone"...Certainly by today's standards)
However, the point is that a much, much larger number of people now have smartphones (phones able to run fairly sophisticated apps) with GPS in them. It's not new, just more common.
I agree with Geocaching, BTW. I love that game (sport?). I just did one today while the wife and I were out on a hike.
Not just requires Leopard - it runs only on Macs with Core 2 (or some Xeon) processors. That means not only no PPC love, but even the first several Intel Macs are out of luck. Like my wife's 2-year old laptop (only 1 year old or so when they finally released Java 6).
Yes, you're generally right. But I feel you're being a bit pedantic.
Of course the iPhone OS allows and regularly does multitasking, and applications themselves tend to be multithreaded. And applications regularly run in the background (some all the time, like the iTunes controller widglet). But I'm obviously talking about the iPhone OS's tendency (by design) to terminate user-level applications when they're placed in the "background". However you want to phrase it, when I switch out of one user-level application, it will typically be terminated immediately. It may not be 100% accurate to call that "lack of multitasking", but that phrase fairly closely approximates the user-level reality of the situation.
In any case, as Slashdot discussions tend to go, we're WAY off topic here. The OP was asking about how the Web Browser was. The video I posted above is the best information I've seen to give non-Pre owners an idea.
I'm interested as well. This is my biggest irritant about the iPhone. I love the interface and rendering of pages in Mobile Safari, it is top-notch. But there's something very broken about the page *loading* (network stack issues? Inefficiencies at paralleling requests and dealing with latency?). For most sites it's slow at best, and for some sites it's glacial. I can place a 400Mhz G4 running Safari and the iPhone next to each other, on the same network, and load a page, and the desktop typically completes in 1/10th the time (or less!)
Plus the limited memory on the iPhone and lack of multitasking means that it's very likely that if I load a page, then perform some other action (including opening a second page without leaving Safari), I'll have to reload the first page again when I go back to it. And that's another 1min delay.
This all means that I avoid Safari whenever possible. I'll use either a native app for the page (like Wikipedia or Slashdot, etc), or I'll try to find a mobile version of the site. Loading the full page is done only grudgingly. That sort of takes the "killer" part of of the "killer app" that Mobile Safari is supposed to be.
Anyway, looks like PreCentral has done a very good video overview of the browser, and shootout between the Pre, iPhone (2.1 I assume) and G1:
My takeaway is that overall the Pre browser seems as good as the iPhone's, and generally better in the areas that bother me. It's definitely still much slower than a desktop browser on even an anemic PC would be, but it seems:
- Interface is definitely different, but from what I see here I like it about equally to the iPhone interface. Navigation, panning, zooming, bookmarking, etc. is all about what I'd want from a mobile browser. I don't like lack of double-tap animation, though =)
- Time to load/render final page is significantly, but not dramatically, faster than iPhone
- Responsiveness of dragging around the page while it is still loading is much better. Mobile Safari tends to start having serious performance issues when it is loading/rendering a page.
- It's still only rendering a small part of the page at a time and you get the telltale "unrendered grid" if you scroll/zoom to an unrendered section of the page. Once you stop scrolling, it renders after a brief pause. Seems pretty much exactly like iPhone here.
- Tough to say from the video here, but my general impression is that pages generally stay loaded until closed...Or at least takes a lot more for the Pre browser to "flush" cache of a loaded page.
- At least some sites aren't recognizing the Pre at the moment. They're presenting full sites instead of a mobile site by default, which some will like (I won't, depending on the site). I'm sure that'll change.
- It seems to have occasional problems recognizing or reacting to orientation changes (landscape/portrait mode shifting). This is true for me about 10% of the time with the iPhone, though it's a little better than back in OS 1.0. And there's a couple of examples of the same with the Pre just in this 8min demo.
- We won't even talk about how much better they are than the G1 browser. Yikes.
I've fought these wars the best I can since we invaded Iraq...but protest doesn't work when your government doesn't listen and the people are too comfortable.
Really. What protests did you attend and/or organize? Which congressmen did you contact? What campaigns did you work for? What organizations related to the issues important to you were you involved with? What offices did you run for?
By "I've fought these wars the best I can" do you mean "I've complained about it to people I've met"? Or have you actually done something?
OS X doesn't support the ability to CHANGE CIFS (SMB) permissions, so that's a concern. It can at least change NFS permissions, if only from the CLI or other Unix permissions-aware apps.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, Linux really should look into the work done by NeXt on App Bundles in NeXtStep/Openstep (and inherited by OS X). It's a beautiful design.
> Installing software on linux is easier than on windows or osx.
Hahahahahahahaha
On OSX, 99% of application installs require one of the following:
1) mv Application.app
2) Drag application to any destination you want.
That's it.
> Either
> apt-get install foobar
> or find foobar in the GUI package manager/app store/software center.
That's great. Now:
1) What if the application you want to install hasn't been ported by the application maintainer (particularly smaller, less popular applications)?
2) What if the VERSION of the application hasn't been ported yet (I regularly need some new version of software but the update isn't posted to the repository for months)
3) What if the application you're trying to install is - horrors - not open-source?
4) What if you're using a somewhat older distribution and packages aren't being updated often or at all anymore? (And "older" in this case may mean only two years. Or less.)
5) What if you want to install multiple versions of an application?
6) What if you want multiple instances of the application, or to control where the application is installed?
7) What if you want to install two different pieces of software that have irresolvable library conflicts (possibly due to software not being updated on a regular basis)
8) End up in a broken state because package management and extreme library sharing like this is inherently more fragile?
9) Don't want to wait for 18 different pieces of software to be installed/updated just because you want to update your media player app?
I run into these problems on a regular basis. It drives me absolutely insane.
No. Not even a little bit.
That's probably another use, but I really don't think that's the main place where it'd be useful. I DREAM of being able to just download an application archive, extract it *anywhere I want*, and just run it. Just use it, without having to worry. Any application - not the apps (and versions) that some distribution maintainer has gotten around to porting to my flavor.
Maybe not, but it's something that a number of people that want to use Linux want to do. Including me. For the life of me I can't understand why people would resist this. If this takes off and works as well as advertised it will save all of us a tremendous amount of headaches.
Why is this a kludge?
App portability and dependency problems has been one of the Achilles Heels of Linux since, well, forever. We laughed at Windows for DLL-hell, and if anything package managers seem like the ugly kludge way to resolve it to me. I wonder how many tens or hundreds of thousands of man-hours have been lost dealing with these sorts of issues. It's by far the #1 thing that's prevented me from using Linux for those purposes, and I'd REALLY like to use Linux (though there are others). Hell, it's the main thing that's kept me from taking Linux seriously outside the server room. Particularly since people really don't seem to get why this is a problem.
- I should be able to install an application QUICKLY and easily. There's no reason why "installation" should be more complicated than "copying/extracting the binaries to wherever I want them to go".
- I should not be dependent on some third party to get around to porting each version of software to my flavor of Linux. When a new version of Wireshark or VLC or whatever software comes out, I should be able to install it *quickly and simply* without waiting on package maintainers to get around to it (even if some are very responsive)
- Along with the above, I shouldn't be in a state where I can no longer easily install applications because I'm using a somewhat older distribution (and packages are no longer being maintained for that version)
- Although the option should be there, it should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER be considered "acceptable" to expect users to compile an application to install it (and all the potential headaches of getting that to work, including hacking make files, dealing with dependencies, patching the software, actually doing C++ debugging, etc).
Balloon up my applications with static libraries. Please. The trade-off in system administration headache would pay for itself 100s of times over.
There just wouldn't be as many PCs. Something else would have emerged. Nothing that exists today, I'd say. Maybe better, maybe worse.
"You are missing his point. On a non-deduplicated system if one block goes bad you lose one file, on a deduplicated system you can lose any number of files due to one bad block."
This is true, but he was saying "This is the opposite of RAID...it squeezes every bit of redundancy out of your data". Like having random duplicate copies of files scattered around a filesystem was a redundancy mechanism that is somehow on-par with RAID, and so enabling dedupe means that you have eliminated a serious data redundancy mechanism. It's true that it might be a higher-impact loss when you lose a single file (and require more restores or mean more users will be impacted), but it's not a situation where you've suddenly killed your data backup plan and lost all your data. You're just not going to be using random duplicate copies of files on your FS in this way.
"Personally, I'd be _terrified_ of using dedup for primary storage. What this does is exactly the opposite of RAID - it squeezes every last bit of redundancy out of your data, and makes everything dependent upon the integrity of your blockpool database. Loose a single blocklet and you stand to lose _all_ of your data. "
Dedupe reduces multiple copies of the same data *on the same storage*
I think you're implying that having - probably purely at random - multiple copies of some files on the same FS is somehow a proper backup/redundancy strategy. It sounds like you're saying that WITHOUT dedupe, if a file got corrupted you'd at least be able to go restore it from some other copy of the file. I can't imagine how this is true - you can't rely on chance copies of multiple files to be able to recover from a file corruption. That's crazy. With or without dedupe you better have BACKUPS of the data on some other storage.
Maybe you mean that if something gets corrupted in some of the deduped data that you'll lose ALL dedupe data (so maybe half of your filesystem or something). Most dedupe technologies don't work that way - if corruption occurs it will impact the actual data or possibly file that was affected (and obviously each copy of that data throughout the FS). But not more than that.
The NS20 goes head-to-head with that NetApp box, so I'm not sure if that's true in this case (need to be fortune 10 to afford it). And from what I read a couple of days ago, it's the most commonly sold NAS product in this class...which is why I thought it was weird not to include it in the review. I'm curious what they would have said about it.
I can't say that I've ever heard dedup percentage of 95% related to the NS series, which is very similar to the products in this article (NAS/SAN server that does dedupe on live data that lives on the array). Maybe you're confusing with products like Data Domain or Avamar or something?
I assume they didn't spend the money only for dedupe? That box has a whole lot of features.
Odd that if they reviewed this class of products they didn't review the most common deduping NAS/SAN applicance - the EMC NS-series (particularly NS20).
Sorry troll, iPhone plays it just fine.
And sorry parent troll, but that video also plays just fine as Webm. Or flash.
Really?
Although there are many conspiracy theorists out there, I'd say most people who have done basic research on "The Buzzer" have come to agree that it is a station used for Ionosphere research. Some details:
- Its frequency (4.625Mhz) is mentioned specifically in several scientific papers. One paper discusses a technique for ionosphere research using doppler shift measurements reflected from a high-frequency radio wave. (http://elpub.wdcb.ru/journals/rjes/v10/2007ES000227/2.shtml)
- This paper refers to the signal as coming from a "stable basic generator", sending a carrier wave from a standard radio transmitter.
- Several (supposed) radio experts have said that the signal being sent is the kind that would make sense for this kind of research - the tone sent at a fixed strength and amplitude/pitch, with a regular cutoff and regular repeat would be useful to measure doppler shift and falloff at the edge of the signal.
- The paper above was authored (partially) by "S V Anisimov".
- Sergei V Anisimov is the senior director of the "Borok Geophysical Observatory" (http://wwwbrk.adm.yar.ru/main_e.html), which does, among other things, Ionosphere research.
- Borok Geophysical Observatory is based not tremendously far from the CONFIRMED location of the UVB-76 transmitter. It is easy to imagine that they could have an agreement with the owners of this transmitter (the russian government?) or own it themselves, and be using it for this research.
Conspiracy nuts will say that this is just a cover story.
It doesn't explain why the voice messages occur occasionally (some have theorized that having the random tones of a human voice can be used for other doppler measurements). And even if this research is occurring, it doesn't mean that this transmitter isn't used for other purposes as well. But nobody seems to mention any of this. The dead man's switch theory of world destruction is way more exciting, I guess.
A tag on the post implies it, but I thought it'd be worthwhile to mention specifically that this applies to Windows and Linux, but NOT Macintosh.
Personally, although the Flash plugin for Mac is dramatically less speedy than on Windows, I've never had stability issues with it. I've never once, in the last (...6 years?) had it crash and/or take the browser with it.
My only real problem with Firefox has been the bizarrely high CPU utilization and tremendous memory leaks, neither of which are caused by extensions or plugins. For years now if I use the browser for a few hours or more, opening 4-15 tabs, it'll start using 30-50% of CPU. Certain sites seem to trigger it more than others, but it's not consistent. The problem persists even if I close all tabs, and happens even with Flash and other plugins/extensions disabled. In fact, it's hovering around 20% CPU usage right now and 600MB RAM consumed, and the only thing I have open is this comment window. I've had this problem now on 5 different Macs and various profiles over the years. CPU problem doesn't happen on Windows (but the memory usage problem does). And it's driven me to Chrome for the last 4 months, where at least memory is released/CPU drops when I close a tab (kill a process).
Nobody said it was brand new (although I think it'd be a pretty big stretch to call the RAZR a "smartphone"...Certainly by today's standards) However, the point is that a much, much larger number of people now have smartphones (phones able to run fairly sophisticated apps) with GPS in them. It's not new, just more common. I agree with Geocaching, BTW. I love that game (sport?). I just did one today while the wife and I were out on a hike.
I'd rather stop listening to any music ever than spend money on them again. Every time I think they can't be more douchetastic, they find a way.
As soon as it stops being another greedy profit factory, I'll start buying again. I'm not holding my breath.
Not just requires Leopard - it runs only on Macs with Core 2 (or some Xeon) processors. That means not only no PPC love, but even the first several Intel Macs are out of luck. Like my wife's 2-year old laptop (only 1 year old or so when they finally released Java 6).
Yes, you're generally right. But I feel you're being a bit pedantic.
Of course the iPhone OS allows and regularly does multitasking, and applications themselves tend to be multithreaded. And applications regularly run in the background (some all the time, like the iTunes controller widglet). But I'm obviously talking about the iPhone OS's tendency (by design) to terminate user-level applications when they're placed in the "background". However you want to phrase it, when I switch out of one user-level application, it will typically be terminated immediately. It may not be 100% accurate to call that "lack of multitasking", but that phrase fairly closely approximates the user-level reality of the situation.
In any case, as Slashdot discussions tend to go, we're WAY off topic here. The OP was asking about how the Web Browser was. The video I posted above is the best information I've seen to give non-Pre owners an idea.
I'm interested as well. This is my biggest irritant about the iPhone. I love the interface and rendering of pages in Mobile Safari, it is top-notch. But there's something very broken about the page *loading* (network stack issues? Inefficiencies at paralleling requests and dealing with latency?). For most sites it's slow at best, and for some sites it's glacial. I can place a 400Mhz G4 running Safari and the iPhone next to each other, on the same network, and load a page, and the desktop typically completes in 1/10th the time (or less!)
Plus the limited memory on the iPhone and lack of multitasking means that it's very likely that if I load a page, then perform some other action (including opening a second page without leaving Safari), I'll have to reload the first page again when I go back to it. And that's another 1min delay.
This all means that I avoid Safari whenever possible. I'll use either a native app for the page (like Wikipedia or Slashdot, etc), or I'll try to find a mobile version of the site. Loading the full page is done only grudgingly. That sort of takes the "killer" part of of the "killer app" that Mobile Safari is supposed to be.
Anyway, looks like PreCentral has done a very good video overview of the browser, and shootout between the Pre, iPhone (2.1 I assume) and G1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dewMwv4eQIk&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.precentral.net%2Fpalm-pre-browser-video-review-and-iphone-3g-g1-showdown&feature=player_embedded
My takeaway is that overall the Pre browser seems as good as the iPhone's, and generally better in the areas that bother me. It's definitely still much slower than a desktop browser on even an anemic PC would be, but it seems:
- Interface is definitely different, but from what I see here I like it about equally to the iPhone interface. Navigation, panning, zooming, bookmarking, etc. is all about what I'd want from a mobile browser. I don't like lack of double-tap animation, though =)
- Time to load/render final page is significantly, but not dramatically, faster than iPhone
- Responsiveness of dragging around the page while it is still loading is much better. Mobile Safari tends to start having serious performance issues when it is loading/rendering a page.
- It's still only rendering a small part of the page at a time and you get the telltale "unrendered grid" if you scroll/zoom to an unrendered section of the page. Once you stop scrolling, it renders after a brief pause. Seems pretty much exactly like iPhone here.
- Tough to say from the video here, but my general impression is that pages generally stay loaded until closed...Or at least takes a lot more for the Pre browser to "flush" cache of a loaded page.
- At least some sites aren't recognizing the Pre at the moment. They're presenting full sites instead of a mobile site by default, which some will like (I won't, depending on the site). I'm sure that'll change.
- It seems to have occasional problems recognizing or reacting to orientation changes (landscape/portrait mode shifting). This is true for me about 10% of the time with the iPhone, though it's a little better than back in OS 1.0. And there's a couple of examples of the same with the Pre just in this 8min demo.
- We won't even talk about how much better they are than the G1 browser. Yikes.
I look THAT much like your fiancee?
I thought they already had a planned replacement? I remember there being design contests, etc.
http://www.oldmanofthemountainlegacyfund.org/
I've fought these wars the best I can since we invaded Iraq...but protest doesn't work when your government doesn't listen and the people are too comfortable.
Really. What protests did you attend and/or organize? Which congressmen did you contact? What campaigns did you work for? What organizations related to the issues important to you were you involved with? What offices did you run for?
By "I've fought these wars the best I can" do you mean "I've complained about it to people I've met"? Or have you actually done something?
OS X doesn't support the ability to CHANGE CIFS (SMB) permissions, so that's a concern. It can at least change NFS permissions, if only from the CLI or other Unix permissions-aware apps.