"do what Apple did; take the BSD kernel, add a few bells and whistles with a fancy skin and pretend they invented it"
The kernel is Mach, not BSD (although the userland is). The driver model (IOKit) and kernel extension system are completely Apple-designed. They're even thrown out venerable systems like cron, init, and rc.d in favor of the much more flexible launchd - which is open source and Apache licensed. All of this neglects the higher-level APIs, which are based on NeXT although hugely expanded over the last 12 years. And the "pretty skin" is a PDF-based, resolution independent, compositing, GPU-accelerated windowing system - all of which Apple has had since 10.2 in 2002. X11 is just now managing some of this (good luck on GPU-accelerated windowing with the state of open source drivers).
Apple has certainly taken advantage of a powerful open-source foundation in Mach and BSD. But they've then done a hell of a lot with it and made a much better product. And where it makes sense (launchd, WebKit, etc) they've given back to the community. Isn't that how open source is supposed to work?
Impressive ignorance. It makes the rest of your comment and opinions rather suspect.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have a clue about Macroeconomics and the impact of spending on GDP. Yes, there are long-term effects that will have to be dealt with. However, we need an economic response NOW, and the best way to do that is via direct stimulus. As was mentioned elsewhere, money injected into the economy is spent and respent several times before it's all saved in bank accounts and no longer has any direct economic impact. This helps reverse the slipping spending trends (both consumer and business), and if you do it right, putting the brakes on a downward spiral and seeing a small upswing can start to feed on itself in a virtuous cycle (much as the current economic crisis is a vicious cycle). Economics is a social science after all; don't ignore the psychological effects.
Deficit spending has been the prescription for pulling out of a recession ever since the Great Depression, and for good reason - it works.
Once you load the OS, *and* Office, *and* Lotus Notes or Outlook, *and* corporate anti-virus/firewall, *and* four JRE's because each Java app doesn't *quite* work with the latest JRE... Well, you get the picture. A standard business desktop isn't just the OS - they layer all kinds of dreck on it. By the time you support all of that, your hardware requirements have moved considerably upstream.
And please stop with the "my 386 could". Times move on, features improve, deal with it. Or go feel free to dig up said 386, install DOS or Win 3.1, and let us know just how much you love it.
And I call bullshit. You know all those reports of Macs showing up in droves at open source conferences? Guess what - most of them aren't being bought to run Linux on. Mac OS X is a geek's dream - I like the fact that I get all of the benefits of a proprietary software base, as well as the benefits of a UNIX base and open source apps. And by the way, it does come in a cool box that just works - that certainly doesn't hurt. I like tweaking more than the next person, but that doesn't mean I like dicking around with conf files just to get my computer to work in the first place.
It's all a matter of perception, and once you get down to these weights, yes, you notice a couple ounces. One of them is 50% heavier than the other, does that help?
Of course, you might not notice it if you're toting the standard 8lb budget brick laptop that most Windows users seem to have.
I'll tell you what - you give me a few suitcases of that soon to be worthless money, I'll give you some worthless goods in exchange (perhaps some brightly colored beads?), and we'll call it even.
> IBM is at a 20 year high for employment; the highest since it dropped 150k workers in the 90's.
Yes, but where? We've done a huge amount of hiring in India, Argentina, and Brazil, and have been laying off US employees left and right.
We are absolutely cut to the bone in the US, and have been mildly dysfunctional for the last couple years as a result. Every time you try to get anything done, people have either been laid off or reorg'ed to death, and no one knows who to talk to anymore. Last year I was reorg'ed four times, and I can't even tell you who I report to beyond my first-line manager (seriously - I don't know off-hand).
* Trying out Win7 and raving about how good it is * Finding out that Win7 is just Windows Vista with some UI and performance enhancements
Um, that's why Windows Vista sucked. The performance was poor and the UI changes were... questionable (overly excited UAC, anyone?). I've tried Vista since installing 7, and while yes, a lot of what people like was there, it wasn't as well done. Now it's finally usable - it's just a shame that 7 wasn't released as Vista SP2...
No one said save it to the current file - just write it to disk and read it back in on next use - just like Word Autosaving and such. But stopping shutdown - especially when it may be initiated remotely or automatically - is simply stupid.
Seriously, what use do you have for this unless you're working in an AIX server environment? Even then it would be of dubious value methinks. I hate to take a question and say use something else like Linux or OS X, but... yeah.
More detail perhaps on why AIX on the desktop is useful? And if there aren't many reasons, then we know why it was killed.
...when it came out. And it trounced it. That was back when said competition had themes, visualizers, and a host of features iTunes didn't. iTunes, on the other hand, is excellently designed software, and killed off Audion and others.
Songbird and Amarok will fail utterly on the Mac. Songbird will use the same non-native XUL engine that Firefox and Thunderbird use with far fewer benefits, and Amarok will be QT-based, which in many cases looks and feels even less native than XUL. Neither will have any platform integration with the huge number of iTunes addons, scripts, widgets, etc. And of course, neither of them will work with the iPod, let alone the iTunes Music Store (if you care for such a thing).
And it's SO hard to import files. Open them and iTunes launches and (optionally) places them in your library. Done. Want to "auto-scan" a folder? Do it with a folder action - there are even samples included with the OS to do exactly that.
System is worth $11k today, maybe $2k by 2010. Super high-end systems that are not designed for professionals (or servers for datacenters) just have never made sense to me. The depreciation is just too great on a computer.
Not to mention it will be worth $0 when the oil containment fails.
Are you missing the point? OpenOffice on the Mac, "native" or not (I don't know what warped definition of native they're using, but just because it's not X11 does not mean it's native!), looks like complete ass and has no platform integration. Microsoft Office, on the other hand, has gone to great lengths to be attractive and even *gasp* innovative on the Mac, and support native technologies.
OpenOffice is great on Windows and Linux, but near-unusable on the Mac.
Actually, it is the speed - the write speed. Most SSD's on the market right now have extremely slow write speeds, to the point that it can make running an OS off them quite painful.
First get performance to parity with hard drives on write (they already kill them on reads due to lack of seek times), and then start ramping up the capacity. I expect we'll see both of these well underway by the end of next year. 200GB SSD, anyone?
If you buy a cheap piece of shit laptop, then I wouldn't expect you to fork over for a premium. They don't carry these at Wal-Mart.
I'm looking forward to SSD's after suffering two head crashes in the last few years (and none in the preceding 20). Silence and possibly improved energy efficiency are just icing on the cake.
Finally, long sequential reads being the norm? I disagree. Look at any Linux/BSD/Mac OS X system. The OS is made up of a bajillion little files. Applications are made of of lots of files, libraries, resources, etc. SSD's *kill* hard drives on content like that.
For some sites, the massive increase in processing power will certainly handle SSL with aplomb. However, take some of the massive e-commerce sites that handle several hundred megabits of traffic (sustained all day), and SSL encrypting everything would bring them to their knees.
Also, if your traffic is SSL encrypted it will break any but the most trivial methods of load balancing (especially if session persistence is important). You'll need dedicated SSL "accelerators" to handle the decryption and encryption at the load balancer level, or else they can't see the cookies and direct you to the proper web/app server. This relieves your servers, but those devices have limits as well - I think you see where this is going. Encrypting everything quickly costs a LOT of money, and for a lot of content, for little to no benefit. Take retailers for example - most people come to browse around, and only a tiny fraction of their traffic is spent completing a transaction. Do you really want to encrypt the other 99% of browsing product pages?
SSL encrypting every transaction would be useful (transactions including any information you're sending, whether it's your financials, mail, or a slashdot post), but encrypting every web page (and associated flotsam like graphics and CSS) is overkill.
"Features that will not work without typo correction enabled: shortcuts, adult site blocking, custom image, custom message."
No, I just want to get rid of the damn search page misfeature. For being such otherwise "good guys" and very technical, I'm amazed that they screw things up in this fashion so very badly.
Slashdot Mirror
"do what Apple did; take the BSD kernel, add a few bells and whistles with a fancy skin and pretend they invented it"
The kernel is Mach, not BSD (although the userland is). The driver model (IOKit) and kernel extension system are completely Apple-designed. They're even thrown out venerable systems like cron, init, and rc.d in favor of the much more flexible launchd - which is open source and Apache licensed. All of this neglects the higher-level APIs, which are based on NeXT although hugely expanded over the last 12 years. And the "pretty skin" is a PDF-based, resolution independent, compositing, GPU-accelerated windowing system - all of which Apple has had since 10.2 in 2002. X11 is just now managing some of this (good luck on GPU-accelerated windowing with the state of open source drivers).
Apple has certainly taken advantage of a powerful open-source foundation in Mach and BSD. But they've then done a hell of a lot with it and made a much better product. And where it makes sense (launchd, WebKit, etc) they've given back to the community. Isn't that how open source is supposed to work?
Impressive ignorance. It makes the rest of your comment and opinions rather suspect.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have a clue about Macroeconomics and the impact of spending on GDP. Yes, there are long-term effects that will have to be dealt with. However, we need an economic response NOW, and the best way to do that is via direct stimulus. As was mentioned elsewhere, money injected into the economy is spent and respent several times before it's all saved in bank accounts and no longer has any direct economic impact. This helps reverse the slipping spending trends (both consumer and business), and if you do it right, putting the brakes on a downward spiral and seeing a small upswing can start to feed on itself in a virtuous cycle (much as the current economic crisis is a vicious cycle). Economics is a social science after all; don't ignore the psychological effects.
Deficit spending has been the prescription for pulling out of a recession ever since the Great Depression, and for good reason - it works.
> How will we start beach bonfires?
Kindle boxes!
> What will we line the bottom of the bird cage with?
Kindles!
> What will we do when we forget our umbrellas?
Kindles!
> What will we put under kitty's food bowl?
Kindles!
> What will we roll up and smack our friends with?
Kindles! (bonus for harder smackability)
> How will we "copy" things with Silly Putty?
Damn, you got me there. I knew there was something wrong with this Kindle-utopia. :-)
Once you load the OS, *and* Office, *and* Lotus Notes or Outlook, *and* corporate anti-virus/firewall, *and* four JRE's because each Java app doesn't *quite* work with the latest JRE... Well, you get the picture. A standard business desktop isn't just the OS - they layer all kinds of dreck on it. By the time you support all of that, your hardware requirements have moved considerably upstream.
And please stop with the "my 386 could". Times move on, features improve, deal with it. Or go feel free to dig up said 386, install DOS or Win 3.1, and let us know just how much you love it.
Had they not just reported record profits they might have a leg to stand on. As is, they don't.
And I call bullshit. You know all those reports of Macs showing up in droves at open source conferences? Guess what - most of them aren't being bought to run Linux on. Mac OS X is a geek's dream - I like the fact that I get all of the benefits of a proprietary software base, as well as the benefits of a UNIX base and open source apps. And by the way, it does come in a cool box that just works - that certainly doesn't hurt. I like tweaking more than the next person, but that doesn't mean I like dicking around with conf files just to get my computer to work in the first place.
It's all a matter of perception, and once you get down to these weights, yes, you notice a couple ounces. One of them is 50% heavier than the other, does that help?
Of course, you might not notice it if you're toting the standard 8lb budget brick laptop that most Windows users seem to have.
I'll tell you what - you give me a few suitcases of that soon to be worthless money, I'll give you some worthless goods in exchange (perhaps some brightly colored beads?), and we'll call it even.
> IBM is at a 20 year high for employment; the highest since it dropped 150k workers in the 90's.
Yes, but where? We've done a huge amount of hiring in India, Argentina, and Brazil, and have been laying off US employees left and right.
We are absolutely cut to the bone in the US, and have been mildly dysfunctional for the last couple years as a result. Every time you try to get anything done, people have either been laid off or reorg'ed to death, and no one knows who to talk to anymore. Last year I was reorg'ed four times, and I can't even tell you who I report to beyond my first-line manager (seriously - I don't know off-hand).
The remainder will largely be made up of Maxtor's Asia-Pacific manufacturing workers, Seagate said.
The drives with bad firmware came out of operations in Thailand, if I recall. This could still easily be Maxtor...
* Trying out Win7 and raving about how good it is
* Finding out that Win7 is just Windows Vista with some UI and performance enhancements
Um, that's why Windows Vista sucked. The performance was poor and the UI changes were... questionable (overly excited UAC, anyone?). I've tried Vista since installing 7, and while yes, a lot of what people like was there, it wasn't as well done. Now it's finally usable - it's just a shame that 7 wasn't released as Vista SP2...
I don't know, perhaps they are lining up now?
Hello? Temp files?
No one said save it to the current file - just write it to disk and read it back in on next use - just like Word Autosaving and such. But stopping shutdown - especially when it may be initiated remotely or automatically - is simply stupid.
Seriously, what use do you have for this unless you're working in an AIX server environment? Even then it would be of dubious value methinks. I hate to take a question and say use something else like Linux or OS X, but... yeah.
More detail perhaps on why AIX on the desktop is useful? And if there aren't many reasons, then we know why it was killed.
...when it came out. And it trounced it. That was back when said competition had themes, visualizers, and a host of features iTunes didn't. iTunes, on the other hand, is excellently designed software, and killed off Audion and others.
Songbird and Amarok will fail utterly on the Mac. Songbird will use the same non-native XUL engine that Firefox and Thunderbird use with far fewer benefits, and Amarok will be QT-based, which in many cases looks and feels even less native than XUL. Neither will have any platform integration with the huge number of iTunes addons, scripts, widgets, etc. And of course, neither of them will work with the iPod, let alone the iTunes Music Store (if you care for such a thing).
And it's SO hard to import files. Open them and iTunes launches and (optionally) places them in your library. Done. Want to "auto-scan" a folder? Do it with a folder action - there are even samples included with the OS to do exactly that.
Themes do nothing to "clean" or "simplify" the interface. They just apply a mishmash of bitmaps to it - almost always hideously ugly ones.
...it's not an OS in my book. It may be an excellent (hmph!) network API, but it is not an operating system of any kind.
System is worth $11k today, maybe $2k by 2010. Super high-end systems that are not designed for professionals (or servers for datacenters) just have never made sense to me. The depreciation is just too great on a computer.
Not to mention it will be worth $0 when the oil containment fails.
Are you missing the point? OpenOffice on the Mac, "native" or not (I don't know what warped definition of native they're using, but just because it's not X11 does not mean it's native!), looks like complete ass and has no platform integration. Microsoft Office, on the other hand, has gone to great lengths to be attractive and even *gasp* innovative on the Mac, and support native technologies.
OpenOffice is great on Windows and Linux, but near-unusable on the Mac.
Actually, it is the speed - the write speed. Most SSD's on the market right now have extremely slow write speeds, to the point that it can make running an OS off them quite painful.
First get performance to parity with hard drives on write (they already kill them on reads due to lack of seek times), and then start ramping up the capacity. I expect we'll see both of these well underway by the end of next year. 200GB SSD, anyone?
If you buy a cheap piece of shit laptop, then I wouldn't expect you to fork over for a premium. They don't carry these at Wal-Mart.
I'm looking forward to SSD's after suffering two head crashes in the last few years (and none in the preceding 20). Silence and possibly improved energy efficiency are just icing on the cake.
Finally, long sequential reads being the norm? I disagree. Look at any Linux/BSD/Mac OS X system. The OS is made up of a bajillion little files. Applications are made of of lots of files, libraries, resources, etc. SSD's *kill* hard drives on content like that.
For some sites, the massive increase in processing power will certainly handle SSL with aplomb. However, take some of the massive e-commerce sites that handle several hundred megabits of traffic (sustained all day), and SSL encrypting everything would bring them to their knees.
Also, if your traffic is SSL encrypted it will break any but the most trivial methods of load balancing (especially if session persistence is important). You'll need dedicated SSL "accelerators" to handle the decryption and encryption at the load balancer level, or else they can't see the cookies and direct you to the proper web/app server. This relieves your servers, but those devices have limits as well - I think you see where this is going. Encrypting everything quickly costs a LOT of money, and for a lot of content, for little to no benefit. Take retailers for example - most people come to browse around, and only a tiny fraction of their traffic is spent completing a transaction. Do you really want to encrypt the other 99% of browsing product pages?
SSL encrypting every transaction would be useful (transactions including any information you're sending, whether it's your financials, mail, or a slashdot post), but encrypting every web page (and associated flotsam like graphics and CSS) is overkill.
Free markets rely on the myth of the well-informed consumer.
Have you met the "average" consumer? I think my case is made...
"Features that will not work without typo correction enabled: shortcuts, adult site blocking, custom image, custom message."
No, I just want to get rid of the damn search page misfeature. For being such otherwise "good guys" and very technical, I'm amazed that they screw things up in this fashion so very badly.