In reality, it's no more proprietary than many PC BIOSes out there. Just because it's not as well understood does not make it proprietary.
If you were saying this five or six years ago, then you'd have an argument, but with all the New World machines (Blue & White G3 and later) it's been Open Firmware and pretty well documented. Hell, even OpenBSD boots on Apple hardware now and, you know, those kids are not the quickest to support proprietary anything. They don't particularly enjoy reverse engineering hardware because it's more difficult to make your software stable and secure that way.
Apple has generally been quite open about documenting their own hardware for the last few years. The same certainly can't be said for certain other PC parts manufacturers.
There are many here who say that Microsoft basically blatantly rips off other peoples' ideas and do not truly innovate. While this is certainly true to some extent, it is not the whole story.
Certainly some of these things they really do believe they invented, but it isn't because they're a big pack of liars. It's because the whole Not Invented Here attitude is endemic to the MS culture. If it doesn't come from them, it doesn't exist (or is inferior) as far as they are concerned. There is a hell of a lot of duplicated effort going on at the Redmond campus.
MS employees are often arrogant to the point of obnoxiousness about their company and software. I am almost convinced that it's a contract clause that they cannot say anything bad about their employer or products. Criticism simply isn't allowed it seems, unless it's of another company or product.
Contract employees tend to be a little more liberal though. Some of them have pretty good stories about their employer and don't always subscribe to the MS Knows Best mentality. Buy one of them a beer sometime.:)
Just took at look at sfgate.com using Safari. I can say that the only fonts that look ugly and jaggy are the ones that are not actually drawn by the OS, but are instead pre-rendered images like GIFs and JPEGs.
Safari at the very least does a fine job of rendering sfgate.com and just about every other site out there as far as fonts are concerned. Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Netscape both cause certain smaller fonts to not be rendered anti-aliased, so they look crappier, but I certainly don't see any crooked or fuzzy fonts -- just a few small jagged ones in those Carbon browsers.
I have tended to not like Windows XP's ability to render fonts quite as much. It certainly looks better than fonts in Windows Me, 98, and 95, but that is not saying very much. It tends to ignore kerning and ligatures from time to time, making some fonts which depend heavily upon them simply ugly to read at certain point sizes. OS X on the other hand, while sometimes making fonts look a little too fuzzy, at least typically gets kerning and ligature features right when rendering.
Of course, in a terminal window, I still use a bitmapped, aliased, monospace font for best legibilty over the course of a long day. Anti-aliasing doesn't always lend itself to lots of small terminal windows on the same screen at the same time...
Yeah, but AIX isn't a counterfeit copy of SCO's supposed property. SCO is not suing IBM over what they've done with AIX, so presumably what they've done with AIX in the past has been hunky-dory as far as licensing other Unix code goes.
It's a scare-tactic pure and simple, and anyone with half a brain will figure out (and likely already has) that SCO is running scared, talking out of their asses, and probably not going to be in business much longer. They're a company now run by lawyers and executive sleaze; no company can survive that for long.
It would almost be legitimate if it were Perl code, though, with a few small adjustments since you don't need a semicolon for the last statement in a block.
I blathered on about your choice of phrasing as much as you blathered on about how pathetic it was for me to pick on it. All of a couple sentences, minus some cut-and-pasted dictionary content. It would appear you're as pathetic as I. Makes you proud, doesn't it?
As for the, "most of the time [...] good," bit, whose good do you mean? America's good or the good of the world? I would suggest the former, or do you think we were really in Kuwait to rescue some poor down-trodden people? Perhaps that new tariff on European steel was meant to bolster their economy, maybe? Or maybe ousting or murdering certain South American governments and setting up puppet states is all in the interest of world health?
Yeah, I'd actually say America is probably guilty of some kinds of acts of terrorism as well. We in the West just don't call it that because you don't insult the big dog and then expect to not get bitten. America as a terrorist regime? Perhaps. I can see how some people in this world might think such a thing.
As they say, absolute power (as the world's only Super Power) corrupts absolutely. I'm sure most Romans didn't think their empire was corrupt either right until the very end. Surely most Imperial subjects in the Star Wars Empire didn't either.:-)
Just because your cause is just doesn't make it right.
What the hell kind of a nonsense statement is that? Go look up the definition of the word "just" sometime. Oh wait, here, I'll do it for you.
Main Entry: just
Function: adjective
1 a (1) : having a basis in fact: REASONABLE, WELL-FOUNDED, JUSTIFIED <felt a just fear of the consequences of his actions> (2) : conforming to fact or reason : RIGHT, TRUE, ACCURATE <had a very just notion of the boy's abilities>
Golly, what do you know! "Just," means the same thing as, "right!"
You sure do use the term "anti-American" a lot. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe they aren't anti-American? Maybe they're just against bad decisions. Even America makes bad decisions you know. Uncle Sam does not hold the moral high ground in the world; no one does. America has caused a lot of bullshit to happen, and it's perfectly OK to be upset about that and call the government out on their fuck ups.
If Americans didn't do that, America wouldn't be much of a nation. Jingoist jerks who call everything "anti-American" and apologize for America's foolish or wrong actions all the time don't help America's world image very much. They don't help America to be a good or even great nation. I'd go so far as to say that they're detrimental to the nation because they are the ones who keep saying that it's all right to make the same stupid mistakes over and over again. America did it, so it must be OK! Anyone who says otherwise is obviously anti-American!
That mentality is insane. Part of being a responsible nation is the ability to fess up to major cockups and not constantly justify bad decisions. Unfortunately, America doesn't have a very good track record at doing that. Germany is the only nation I am aware of that feels a significant national shame for their actions of the past. America needs to learn a little bit about this concept I laughingly refer to as, "humility."
Whoa, I parsed that wrong. You wrote "corporate boardrooms" and I read "corporate bedrooms". But, I guess that is just the most appropriate place for all different kinds of fucking...
Somewhere around the latter half of the third trimester, usually. Most babies can be born prematurely during that time and still have a somewhat reasonable chance of good health and survival if given the proper care. Aborting any time after 24 weeks of pregnancy is very chancy and only done if the woman's health is otherwise in a greater risk from the abortion not being performed than from performing it.
I'd say self-sustaining for a baby would be the ability to remain alive when breathing air, and metabolizing nutrients orally or (in extreme cases as is sometimes necessary with humans of the more adult variety) intraveinously, and is provided warmth and care. Extremely premature babies, especially those born before being 24 weeks old, don't often stand a chance of survival outside of the womb, even with specialised medical assistence. Those born after, often do, though it must be admitted that in their adult lives they are often plagued with myriad health problems.
Should morality depend on technology?
Whether or not you think morality should depend on technology is immaterial. Historically, morality does depend on technology more specifically, the knowledge attained as a byproduct of scientific and technological advancement. Perhaps to a smaller or greater degree, but that's a fact.
If you dig through the literature, you can find all kinds of stories of people being harrassed, persecuted, and even murdered for things such as catching a disease which no one understood at the time and believed was the result of being in league with the devil or some such nonsense. These days, we know what causes a vast majority of these diseases thanks to advances in medical science, and it has, thus far, had nothing to do with being in league with Satan.
We consider sexual licentiousness a much less morally wrong or questionable thing (indeed, some even encourage it!) throughout most of the western world in large part due to the advent of birth control, a technology which allowed women to have more control of their reproductive systems.
If you think really hard about it, I'll bet you can find even more examples. A good starting point might be James Burke's Connections television programmes that play on The Discovery Channel from time to time.
Whoever brings up [religion] first is the one who has sacrificed logic in the argument.
That's an overgeneralization and therefore patently false. I have known plenty of atheists and agnostics who use specious and otherwise ill-founded arguments when discussing certain topics. Likewise, I have known highly religious people who use solid and defendable facts in their arguments that don't always wholly utilize dogma, even if they make reference to it.
Don't think that just because you aren't a religious person that you're less fallible in arguments of morality than someone who is. Anyone who has really seriously considered their position on an argument doesn't speak of 'Truth'; they speak of facts. So far, you're as full of hogwash as anyone else who has posted in this thread.
How odd that you have to load your resolv.conf file into the NetInfo databases. I've never had to do that on my OS X boxes. I can just edit them and the change takes effect immediately. (This is even 10.1.3 here.)
The/etc/hosts file is a different matter, but I've never seemed to have had too much of a problem with that one regarding nidump and niload. The only issue comes about when I have to delete entries. In that case I do need to use niutil.
I wholeheartedly agree that MacOS X will probably not replace most other Unixes in a server capacity or any of a dozen others I haven't thought of. That said, I think it's the best Unix workstation OS going right now, which probably isn't saying very much, but it beats many of the alternatives. At least Objective-C is mildly pleasant.
Re:They'll never get me
on
Penguin2Apple
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· Score: 1
You are correct in that OS X's current methods of desktop management are lacking. Personally, I like OS X's GUI better than Windows, but slightly less than, say, Window Maker or even MacOS 9. However...
3. SSH into the box and use niutil, etc. You then have to walk through the netinfo tree to see exactly how a user environment is supposed to be set up. The first time you do this, it will take a half hour.
Well a half hour now to write a script beats five minutes every time you wish to do a very common task, doesn't it? And anyway, not all unices are quite exactly the same. If you'd spent a little more time investigating and a little less time being frustrated (or perhaps even asked nicely about this issue on one of Apple's mailing lists) you'd have come across a couple of handy tools called "nidump" and "niload". They dump and load files formatted like/etc/passwd and/etc/printcap (and quite a few other common Unix file formats give it a whirl) out of and into the NetInfo databases and make your life considerably easier.
If you already have a useradd script that is written in perl or something, modifying it to use nidump and niload as a part of the user adding process ought to be trivial.
Deleting users would be a little bit tougher. You would indeed have to use niutil for that, but niutil doesn't have to be run in interactive mode, so it can still be used from scripts.
Barring all that you could even...
4. Download some perl script that works like "useradd."
But truth be told, the regular version of OS X is not being sold to be used as a server OS with all the usual Unix fixin's although it certainly can be used in that fashion. Apple is selling OS X Server for that, and I would assume that they include most of these basic command-line utilities many of us take for granted.
The normal version of OS X, however, is catered to people who are used to using GUIs and nice little graphical apps to add users and do other administration tasks should they happen to have such a need. (I'd go so far as to say that 90% of MacOS X users never bother to add an account beyond that which is automatically created the first time you run OS X anyway.) And while it can be argued that, even given that circumstance, there's no reason Apple shouldn't include such niceties as "useradd", Apple is probably also considering at what point do they stop including what people consider to be 'standard' utilities. It's a headache to keep up with the joneses, and if you keep it up, soon enough you have an OS that comes distributed on two, three, and more CDs like many Linux distributions do. Ordinary people hate that.
If you really, really, really just want a more standard linux-like or BSD-like Unix that runs on a Mac, might I suggest you pick up a copy of the GNU-Darwin distribution? It even has X. Of course, Debian or YDL are options too.
Otherwise, I'm sure Apple would be more than happy to sell you a copy of OS X Server for $500 or so.:-)
Bzzzt. Printing is analog, it's naturally anti-aliased.
Uh, actually virtually all CRTs are analog too. (Old CGA displays don't really matter much these days, though...) Or did you think the signal coming out of that 15-pin d-sub VGA connector was digital? Surprise, it isn't. Not to mention that some of the electrons meant to bombard phosphorescent element n tends to go astray a bit and bleed into adjascent phosphorescent elements. The results of this can be seen quite dramatically on low-quality CRTs at high resolutions.
In other words, paper is really no less digital than a CRT is. Just as a 640x480 image looks kinda blocky taking up your whole CRT, it looks just as blocky taking up a whole sheet of paper. It's paper's virtue of being able to handle insanely high resolutions that makes it suitable for "displaying" really clear graphics and text. I can't think of a single reason that a CRT oughtn't be able to do the same one day. Anti-aliasing is simply a stop-gap technology until that day arrives, IMHO.
Personally, if I had the option, I'd go for a 150 DPI (or better, actually 300 DPI would make me happy) display over something that only does, say, 1280x1024 with antialiasing. I'd much rather talk about picas and points than pixels. Pixels suck; they're the cause of too much geek envy. (Admit it! When you were still stuck with an 800x600 display you were drooling when your rich friend upgraded to a 20" display that could do a whopping 1600x1200.)
although for quite some time they gave away updates to their OS - until they realized it was a good source of revenue
Actually, they still do. When you buy your first copy of an Apple OS, or a new Mac of any sort, you get a little sheet of coupons that enable you to get an OS upgrade for free or very cheap. (For example, the OS X 10.1 upgrade cost me $20 for the three CDs it consisted of MacOS 9, OS X 10.1 Upgrade, and Developer Tools as well as a couple of manuals. If I had wished, I could have run down to CompUSA and gotten the OS 9 and OS X Upgrade CDs for $0.) When I received my upgrade in the mail, what did I see but a fresh new sheet of coupons valid for yet more OS upgrades.
In the end, however, revenue trumps a desire to take the high road
While this is usually true, I'm not so sure in this case that Apple isn't actually taking the high road. Apple has generally had a history of making the high road profitable, actually. If they did not, you probably wouldn't have your lovely CDROM drive, USB perhipherals, firewire-enabled video cameras, and most of the modern concepts in GUIs right now. We'd probably be 10-20 years behind in all those things.
As far as this CD ripping issue is concerned, why would letting customers do what they want to do not be taking the high road? No one thinks twice about borrowing a friend's CD to tape a couple of the tracks they like. No one worries about making a mix tape of CD tracks for their car stereo. Why should it make any difference that a tape has been replaced with a CD, or maybe even a MiniDisc or an MP3 player? Giving people the freedom to replace their old mix tapes with a more convenient CD or MP3 player seems and awful lot like the high road to me.
Now, what would be interesting if Apple secretly tagged al copies of CDs/DVDs burned with their software - so copies could ultimately be traced to the original source.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that only journalling filesystems are 'real filesystems'.;-) I beg to differ, actually. While I have no great love for sitting through an fsck, I do have a much stronger hatred for losing data. I've never actually lost data due to, for example, a power failure on a UFS/FFS disk. (Well, actually, I have lost a little bit of data on FFS disks where I had softupdates turned on, but at least I survived fsck. No corrupted files, too. Yay.)
On the other hand, I've lost files and experienced corruption in yet others with certain journalling filesystems. That's less fun than just having your whole filesystem hosed and having to restore from backups. It can take weeks to track down the files that look like they encountered a Sledge-O-Matic. (It's not a slicer or a dicer, a chopper or a hopper!)
Journalling is no substitute for a good, fast synchronous filesystem, kids.
The only real problem with HFS+ (other than it's case-preserving-insensitivity) is that while it's fast, it isn't very good. HFS+ is the only filesystem I've ever used where I quite literally had to manually do three fscks in a row before filesystem errors stopped showing up.
Fortunately it fscks fairly quickly, but that's no excuse. I don't feel that I should have to fsck three times in a row upon every boot just to feel safe. I have a feeling this is the reason MacOS (9 especially) sometimes has the reputation of making files disappear randomly, or having other constant filesystem problems, even after a 'successful' disk repair.
There's nothing wrong with UFS (a.k.a. FFS) anyway. It's a rock solid filesystem that's been through it all and is still living to tell the tale. It beats the snot out of ext2; with softupdates it's nearly as fast as ext2 mounted async (the default) and, unlike ext2, it guarantees you'll survive a fsck without complete filesystem corruption. The only filesystem I like better is BeFS.
Hey, Apple! Implement BeFS why don't ya! It supports lots of extended metadata very easily so you can keep your TYPE and CREATOR codes if you want them, plus it's a journalling filesystem which means your users won't get impatient waiting for their systems to come back up if, for some reason their Macs ever crash. Sounds like a really good idea, doesn't it?
Sure you can blame that on the UI. Why aren't they painting at least a blank canvas? Perhaps even showing a little whizzing disc or icon in a corner to let you know it's waiting on the other end for data?
That's just a really, really simple UI concept that I'm surprised so few people pick up on. The user loves to know that her computer is actually doing something by giving her quick-but-simple feedback. It can make all the difference between an application being perceived as being slow and perceived as being very quick. Users love apps that they think are quick. True, you do often burn a few more cycles and memory in making an application appear faster, but the return on the investment is usually worth it. Users simply like applications they think are faster versus ones that may actually be faster, but appear to be slower due to bad timing.
If you're very clever, sometimes all it takes is reordering of what happens when to make all the difference. I know that's been the case for me: flush a buffer earlier, draw a window sooner (even if there's no data ready to be sent to it just yet), check for input earlier (or later!) in the loop, et cetera.
However, does anyone care if the movie sucks as bad as Episode 1, and so far the trailers don't give me much hope.
In a word: no. In two more words: Boba Fett.
Seriously, Star Wars sucks. It's always had a large suck factor (I mean, have you ever actually listened to the dialog? It's insipid!) and it seems te be getting worse. All I want is to see my favorite bounty hunter of all time kick a little ass! It's just too bad they didn't dig up Jeremy Bulloch to play the part for this film; Boba rules.
The only thing the new Star Wars series has going for it is that Ewan McGregor is involved. Poor kid. How much would you care to bet that he feels the same way about his part that Alec Guinness did? And if he doesn't, well maybe he should. At least being the new Obi-Wan should be netting him a nice little profit if not bolstering his career a little more...
All I want now is a Quartz/Carbon based Emacs:) oh yeah, that and a Titanium powerbook so I can trash that fscking Tecra:-)
Ditto. XEmacs preferrably. Just to aggravate RMS you understand.
You might want to look into picking up an iBook if you're not keen on dropping $2500-3500 on the Powerbook though. I've got the 500 MHz white iBook and it runs OS X 10.1 quite well. (In fact, I am pleased enough with 10.1's performance that I don't even have OS 9 installed on disk anymore.)
You're not the only Unixhead who likes Macs, by the way... (-:
Bravo! But I think no matter how many times sane, pragmatic sorts of people say things like you just said, we'll have people still toting the anti-party line. After all, there can only be one good guy, right?
Different computers (and OSes) are better at different things. This is a fact of life and the very reason we don't have homogenous computers across the board. And I consider this a good feature of computer hardware and software. This is how we avoid monopolies, first of all, and second of all, different computing paradigms are better able to handle different kinds of jobs.
You wouldn't trust Red Hat Linux to handle the real-time calculations necessary in a nuclear power facility right now, would you?
Would you use a Sun Fire 15K to do video editing? Or to play Quake 3?
Would you rely on *BSD to provide a no-brainer (even if that means lack of customizability) easy-to-use GUI environment right out of the box?
The answer to all of those is more than likely a resounding, "no," because you've just left the domain of what each one of those computers or OSes is designed for or is really good at.
It just happens, in this case, that Macs are well suited to professional audio work (and will likely become moreso with the advent of the really nice audio APIs Apple has designed for OS X -- 1ms latency and low-level OS support for audio plugins are nice features, folks) so it's not unpragmatic to sell off your PC equipment to pick one up if you're truly serious about your field.
Or you can wait 5 years or more until Linux possibly becomes suited to the task. It's your choice.
You probably do not want to run Apache on a Win32 platform. Apache is a wonderful webserver and the most widely used one out there as well, but there are some serious issues with it on Windows. It's a bit buggier, and it will perform much more slowly than it will on any kind of Unix. Optimising for speed on a Windows platform is a different affair than optimizing on a Unix platform because of the design differences between the two.
If you're concerned about a steep learning curve in setting up a Unix machine, it really isn't as bad as you think. FreeBSD, for example, is an excellent OS and comes with extensive beginners documentation on the CD (in the form of the FreeBSD Handbook) as well as on their website that will explain all of the basics to you. Picking up an O'Reilly book like Essential System Administration and/or Unix In A Nutshell is quite helpful and will slash your learning curve to bits. Unix is really not that tough, but it does require a slightly different way of thinking.
But I digress.
In short, if you're serious about dumping IIS and want to go with something else, strongly consider Apache on Unix and not Win32. If you absolutely need to stay with Win32, you might check out Roxen which I've also had pretty good luck with, is super-easy to configure -- an area Apache can certainly use some help with -- and seems pretty solid. It is free under a GPL license, but the company that writes it also sells service contracts for it if that interests you or your bosses at all.
(well the macs can't, but I'm working on setting up some sort of mac compatible solution alongside samba)
You can use Netatalk to get sharing working with the Macs as well, but there is something of a problem. Most of the versions of Netatalk that I have used will not share files with names that are too long. (I have a bunch of MP3s with very descriptive file names and the limit on file name sizes in MacOS 9 is something around 31 characters or so.) They simply don't show up in the Finder.
If you are using MacOS 9, I really highly recommend you pick up a copy of DAVE and bag setting up Netatalk. DAVE works marvellously for me (and if you ever need to burn a CD especially for your Mac on a *nix box, mkisofs understands the files DAVE uses to keep the extra metadata and resource forks that MacOS's HFS has -- quite convenient for burning CDs full of Mac software), does not have a problem with long file names, and I highly recommend it.
If you are an OS X user, either pick up a copy of Sharity if you are stuck with Mac OS X 10.0.4, or just use MacOS X 10.1 which has an included SMB client. MacOS X can also mount NFS exports, so there is always that alternative as well. I haven't had tremendous luck with Sharity, though.
If more people used PostGres initially I think they would never look back.
I completely agree, because that's how I did it. Doing my research ahead of time, I figured that even if I don't use all the extra features (like transactions) that Postgres provides, the fact that both databases were roughly as easy to use as the other made me choose Postgres. I've never looked back. Even for a small database, Postgres' reputation for good data integrity is important to me. Even small data can be important, after all.
But hey, if someone else wants to use MySQL, more power to them. I don't mind giving out the occasional, "I told you so." (-:
Why is Ars-Fartsica's post marked as a Troll? Her or his observation is fairly poignant, whether or not it is entirely true. (Only NAI execs know for sure.)
This isn't a story about encryption being denied to the masses or anything. It's about a company giving up an unprofitable product line because most people just use the free versions. And in case whoever marked this post as a troll hasn't noticed, there is a great deal of software within Ars' timeframe that is having exactly this kind of thing happening to it: free alternatives are starting to pop up.
Try to think of a commonly used commercial application that is not having a free equivalent currently being worked on. With a bit of searching, you won't find many. Indeed, free software is even becoming increasingly popular as more people are getting sick of dropping $100-700 on software per product. A comprehensive commercial software package these days can cost even more than the computer you bought to use the software on. Do you think even the rather clueless average user isn't going to notice that?
This is also why Linux has more mindshare, marketshare and corporate interest. The god damn project (that being Linux) is able to survive and thrive because the GPL won't allow it to be taken advantage of.
I'm not sure I necessarily agree with this statment. Although it could well be possible, I'd also have to say that laws and personal politics had something to do with it.
Remember, back in the early '90s AT&T threw a big legal fit over some of their code still being in the BSD Unix sources. This effectively put the 386BSD and FreeBSD camps on hold for a couple of years because no one wanted to be violating AT&T's copyrights and have a screaming dog lawyer breathing down their necks. This was subsequently cleared up, of course, but it left many BSD developers quite confused.
Fortunately (or not, depending on your viewpoints I suppose if you're a true BSD bigot! *grin*) around this time, a fun little kernel project was started by the now semi-legendary Linus Torvalds in Finland. He didn't know much about kernels at the time, but didn't care for DOS and Minix didn't appeal so he set out to write his own. Linus, being quite the affable personality, quickly had quite a few people willing to help him out. Since there were no questions about AT&T's copyrights, no one was hesitant to jump in, especially with such a nice guy at the helm.
Some might go so far as to say that the Linux development community for a very long time was really a lot like a cult of personality. It likely wouldn't have mattered that the Linux kernel was licensed under the GPL or the BSD licenses; Linux would still have remained popular because Linus made such a fine benevolent dictator.
I could be wrong about all of this. Are there any early Linux developers around who would be willing to tell me that they contributed to Linux specifically because it was licensed under the GPL?
Also, I'm not convinced that the BSD license is a liability in, as you said, that it can "allow [the code] to be taken advantage of." Any code that is licensed under the BSD license never suddenly become non-free after all. There is nothing that says that if some proprietary company comes along and uses that BSD code base and then extends it to add new features and gizmos, that someone else can't do the same from the same code base and then release those changes under the BSD license as well.
This can lead to a lot of re-inventing the wheel, but in reality it doesn't usually happen THAT often. It can also greatly help with compatibility. There is a reason that BSD sockets are the defacto digital networking paradigm in the world and that is because anyone who wanted to was allowed to just yank out the BSD code from the kernel and adapt it into their OS. Heck, even Linux did this.
The same can be said for X because of it's less restrictive (as compared to the GPL) MIT license on the base source distribution from the X/Open gang. Sure, there are plenty of X implementations, and not all of them are released with source code, but all of them are generally highly interoperable.
Then again, I could just be highly delusional about all of this.;-)
I do agree that the *BSD projects could do with a bit more self-promotion. Personally, I'd like to see OpenBSD wriggle it's way out of the security community and become more generally used. There are some very good things happening there, and some of their utilities (especially the PPP tools and the ease-of-use of most of the encryption related tools) are par excellence.
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In reality, it's no more proprietary than many PC BIOSes out there. Just because it's not as well understood does not make it proprietary.
If you were saying this five or six years ago, then you'd have an argument, but with all the New World machines (Blue & White G3 and later) it's been Open Firmware and pretty well documented. Hell, even OpenBSD boots on Apple hardware now and, you know, those kids are not the quickest to support proprietary anything. They don't particularly enjoy reverse engineering hardware because it's more difficult to make your software stable and secure that way.
Apple has generally been quite open about documenting their own hardware for the last few years. The same certainly can't be said for certain other PC parts manufacturers.
Certainly some of these things they really do believe they invented, but it isn't because they're a big pack of liars. It's because the whole Not Invented Here attitude is endemic to the MS culture. If it doesn't come from them, it doesn't exist (or is inferior) as far as they are concerned. There is a hell of a lot of duplicated effort going on at the Redmond campus.
MS employees are often arrogant to the point of obnoxiousness about their company and software. I am almost convinced that it's a contract clause that they cannot say anything bad about their employer or products. Criticism simply isn't allowed it seems, unless it's of another company or product.
Contract employees tend to be a little more liberal though. Some of them have pretty good stories about their employer and don't always subscribe to the MS Knows Best mentality. Buy one of them a beer sometime. :)
It has improved. Not very long ago, there would have been at least five or six positive moderations on a clueless post like that one.
Safari at the very least does a fine job of rendering sfgate.com and just about every other site out there as far as fonts are concerned. Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Netscape both cause certain smaller fonts to not be rendered anti-aliased, so they look crappier, but I certainly don't see any crooked or fuzzy fonts -- just a few small jagged ones in those Carbon browsers.
I have tended to not like Windows XP's ability to render fonts quite as much. It certainly looks better than fonts in Windows Me, 98, and 95, but that is not saying very much. It tends to ignore kerning and ligatures from time to time, making some fonts which depend heavily upon them simply ugly to read at certain point sizes. OS X on the other hand, while sometimes making fonts look a little too fuzzy, at least typically gets kerning and ligature features right when rendering.
Of course, in a terminal window, I still use a bitmapped, aliased, monospace font for best legibilty over the course of a long day. Anti-aliasing doesn't always lend itself to lots of small terminal windows on the same screen at the same time...
My two pesetas.
It's a scare-tactic pure and simple, and anyone with half a brain will figure out (and likely already has) that SCO is running scared, talking out of their asses, and probably not going to be in business much longer. They're a company now run by lawyers and executive sleaze; no company can survive that for long.
while(&reading_slashdot){++$nerdiness; --$social_life}
As for the, "most of the time [...] good," bit, whose good do you mean? America's good or the good of the world? I would suggest the former, or do you think we were really in Kuwait to rescue some poor down-trodden people? Perhaps that new tariff on European steel was meant to bolster their economy, maybe? Or maybe ousting or murdering certain South American governments and setting up puppet states is all in the interest of world health?
Yeah, I'd actually say America is probably guilty of some kinds of acts of terrorism as well. We in the West just don't call it that because you don't insult the big dog and then expect to not get bitten. America as a terrorist regime? Perhaps. I can see how some people in this world might think such a thing.
As they say, absolute power (as the world's only Super Power) corrupts absolutely. I'm sure most Romans didn't think their empire was corrupt either right until the very end. Surely most Imperial subjects in the Star Wars Empire didn't either. :-)
What the hell kind of a nonsense statement is that? Go look up the definition of the word "just" sometime. Oh wait, here, I'll do it for you.
Golly, what do you know! "Just," means the same thing as, "right!"
You sure do use the term "anti-American" a lot. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe they aren't anti-American? Maybe they're just against bad decisions. Even America makes bad decisions you know. Uncle Sam does not hold the moral high ground in the world; no one does. America has caused a lot of bullshit to happen, and it's perfectly OK to be upset about that and call the government out on their fuck ups.
If Americans didn't do that, America wouldn't be much of a nation. Jingoist jerks who call everything "anti-American" and apologize for America's foolish or wrong actions all the time don't help America's world image very much. They don't help America to be a good or even great nation. I'd go so far as to say that they're detrimental to the nation because they are the ones who keep saying that it's all right to make the same stupid mistakes over and over again. America did it, so it must be OK! Anyone who says otherwise is obviously anti-American!
That mentality is insane. Part of being a responsible nation is the ability to fess up to major cockups and not constantly justify bad decisions. Unfortunately, America doesn't have a very good track record at doing that. Germany is the only nation I am aware of that feels a significant national shame for their actions of the past. America needs to learn a little bit about this concept I laughingly refer to as, "humility."
Whoa, I parsed that wrong. You wrote "corporate boardrooms" and I read "corporate bedrooms". But, I guess that is just the most appropriate place for all different kinds of fucking...
Somewhere around the latter half of the third trimester, usually. Most babies can be born prematurely during that time and still have a somewhat reasonable chance of good health and survival if given the proper care. Aborting any time after 24 weeks of pregnancy is very chancy and only done if the woman's health is otherwise in a greater risk from the abortion not being performed than from performing it.
I'd say self-sustaining for a baby would be the ability to remain alive when breathing air, and metabolizing nutrients orally or (in extreme cases as is sometimes necessary with humans of the more adult variety) intraveinously, and is provided warmth and care. Extremely premature babies, especially those born before being 24 weeks old, don't often stand a chance of survival outside of the womb, even with specialised medical assistence. Those born after, often do, though it must be admitted that in their adult lives they are often plagued with myriad health problems.
Whether or not you think morality should depend on technology is immaterial. Historically, morality does depend on technology more specifically, the knowledge attained as a byproduct of scientific and technological advancement. Perhaps to a smaller or greater degree, but that's a fact.
If you dig through the literature, you can find all kinds of stories of people being harrassed, persecuted, and even murdered for things such as catching a disease which no one understood at the time and believed was the result of being in league with the devil or some such nonsense. These days, we know what causes a vast majority of these diseases thanks to advances in medical science, and it has, thus far, had nothing to do with being in league with Satan.
We consider sexual licentiousness a much less morally wrong or questionable thing (indeed, some even encourage it!) throughout most of the western world in large part due to the advent of birth control, a technology which allowed women to have more control of their reproductive systems.
If you think really hard about it, I'll bet you can find even more examples. A good starting point might be James Burke's Connections television programmes that play on The Discovery Channel from time to time.
That's an overgeneralization and therefore patently false. I have known plenty of atheists and agnostics who use specious and otherwise ill-founded arguments when discussing certain topics. Likewise, I have known highly religious people who use solid and defendable facts in their arguments that don't always wholly utilize dogma, even if they make reference to it.
Don't think that just because you aren't a religious person that you're less fallible in arguments of morality than someone who is. Anyone who has really seriously considered their position on an argument doesn't speak of 'Truth'; they speak of facts. So far, you're as full of hogwash as anyone else who has posted in this thread.
Your username, unfortunately, does not suit you.
And boy, oh boy is this way off topic...
The /etc/hosts file is a different matter, but I've never seemed to have had too much of a problem with that one regarding nidump and niload. The only issue comes about when I have to delete entries. In that case I do need to use niutil.
I wholeheartedly agree that MacOS X will probably not replace most other Unixes in a server capacity or any of a dozen others I haven't thought of. That said, I think it's the best Unix workstation OS going right now, which probably isn't saying very much, but it beats many of the alternatives. At least Objective-C is mildly pleasant.
Well a half hour now to write a script beats five minutes every time you wish to do a very common task, doesn't it? And anyway, not all unices are quite exactly the same. If you'd spent a little more time investigating and a little less time being frustrated (or perhaps even asked nicely about this issue on one of Apple's mailing lists) you'd have come across a couple of handy tools called "nidump" and "niload". They dump and load files formatted like /etc/passwd and /etc/printcap (and quite a few other common Unix file formats give it a whirl) out of and into the NetInfo databases and make your life considerably easier.
If you already have a useradd script that is written in perl or something, modifying it to use nidump and niload as a part of the user adding process ought to be trivial.
Deleting users would be a little bit tougher. You would indeed have to use niutil for that, but niutil doesn't have to be run in interactive mode, so it can still be used from scripts.
Barring all that you could even...
But truth be told, the regular version of OS X is not being sold to be used as a server OS with all the usual Unix fixin's although it certainly can be used in that fashion. Apple is selling OS X Server for that, and I would assume that they include most of these basic command-line utilities many of us take for granted.
The normal version of OS X, however, is catered to people who are used to using GUIs and nice little graphical apps to add users and do other administration tasks should they happen to have such a need. (I'd go so far as to say that 90% of MacOS X users never bother to add an account beyond that which is automatically created the first time you run OS X anyway.) And while it can be argued that, even given that circumstance, there's no reason Apple shouldn't include such niceties as "useradd", Apple is probably also considering at what point do they stop including what people consider to be 'standard' utilities. It's a headache to keep up with the joneses, and if you keep it up, soon enough you have an OS that comes distributed on two, three, and more CDs like many Linux distributions do. Ordinary people hate that.
If you really, really, really just want a more standard linux-like or BSD-like Unix that runs on a Mac, might I suggest you pick up a copy of the GNU-Darwin distribution? It even has X. Of course, Debian or YDL are options too.
Otherwise, I'm sure Apple would be more than happy to sell you a copy of OS X Server for $500 or so. :-)
Uh, actually virtually all CRTs are analog too. (Old CGA displays don't really matter much these days, though...) Or did you think the signal coming out of that 15-pin d-sub VGA connector was digital? Surprise, it isn't. Not to mention that some of the electrons meant to bombard phosphorescent element n tends to go astray a bit and bleed into adjascent phosphorescent elements. The results of this can be seen quite dramatically on low-quality CRTs at high resolutions.
In other words, paper is really no less digital than a CRT is. Just as a 640x480 image looks kinda blocky taking up your whole CRT, it looks just as blocky taking up a whole sheet of paper. It's paper's virtue of being able to handle insanely high resolutions that makes it suitable for "displaying" really clear graphics and text. I can't think of a single reason that a CRT oughtn't be able to do the same one day. Anti-aliasing is simply a stop-gap technology until that day arrives, IMHO.
Personally, if I had the option, I'd go for a 150 DPI (or better, actually 300 DPI would make me happy) display over something that only does, say, 1280x1024 with antialiasing. I'd much rather talk about picas and points than pixels. Pixels suck; they're the cause of too much geek envy. (Admit it! When you were still stuck with an 800x600 display you were drooling when your rich friend upgraded to a 20" display that could do a whopping 1600x1200.)
Actually, they still do. When you buy your first copy of an Apple OS, or a new Mac of any sort, you get a little sheet of coupons that enable you to get an OS upgrade for free or very cheap. (For example, the OS X 10.1 upgrade cost me $20 for the three CDs it consisted of MacOS 9, OS X 10.1 Upgrade, and Developer Tools as well as a couple of manuals. If I had wished, I could have run down to CompUSA and gotten the OS 9 and OS X Upgrade CDs for $0.) When I received my upgrade in the mail, what did I see but a fresh new sheet of coupons valid for yet more OS upgrades.
While this is usually true, I'm not so sure in this case that Apple isn't actually taking the high road. Apple has generally had a history of making the high road profitable, actually. If they did not, you probably wouldn't have your lovely CDROM drive, USB perhipherals, firewire-enabled video cameras, and most of the modern concepts in GUIs right now. We'd probably be 10-20 years behind in all those things.
As far as this CD ripping issue is concerned, why would letting customers do what they want to do not be taking the high road? No one thinks twice about borrowing a friend's CD to tape a couple of the tracks they like. No one worries about making a mix tape of CD tracks for their car stereo. Why should it make any difference that a tape has been replaced with a CD, or maybe even a MiniDisc or an MP3 player? Giving people the freedom to replace their old mix tapes with a more convenient CD or MP3 player seems and awful lot like the high road to me.
Why would that be interesting?
On the other hand, I've lost files and experienced corruption in yet others with certain journalling filesystems. That's less fun than just having your whole filesystem hosed and having to restore from backups. It can take weeks to track down the files that look like they encountered a Sledge-O-Matic. (It's not a slicer or a dicer, a chopper or a hopper!)
Journalling is no substitute for a good, fast synchronous filesystem, kids.
Fortunately it fscks fairly quickly, but that's no excuse. I don't feel that I should have to fsck three times in a row upon every boot just to feel safe. I have a feeling this is the reason MacOS (9 especially) sometimes has the reputation of making files disappear randomly, or having other constant filesystem problems, even after a 'successful' disk repair.
There's nothing wrong with UFS (a.k.a. FFS) anyway. It's a rock solid filesystem that's been through it all and is still living to tell the tale. It beats the snot out of ext2; with softupdates it's nearly as fast as ext2 mounted async (the default) and, unlike ext2, it guarantees you'll survive a fsck without complete filesystem corruption. The only filesystem I like better is BeFS.
Hey, Apple! Implement BeFS why don't ya! It supports lots of extended metadata very easily so you can keep your TYPE and CREATOR codes if you want them, plus it's a journalling filesystem which means your users won't get impatient waiting for their systems to come back up if, for some reason their Macs ever crash. Sounds like a really good idea, doesn't it?
That's just a really, really simple UI concept that I'm surprised so few people pick up on. The user loves to know that her computer is actually doing something by giving her quick-but-simple feedback. It can make all the difference between an application being perceived as being slow and perceived as being very quick. Users love apps that they think are quick. True, you do often burn a few more cycles and memory in making an application appear faster, but the return on the investment is usually worth it. Users simply like applications they think are faster versus ones that may actually be faster, but appear to be slower due to bad timing.
If you're very clever, sometimes all it takes is reordering of what happens when to make all the difference. I know that's been the case for me: flush a buffer earlier, draw a window sooner (even if there's no data ready to be sent to it just yet), check for input earlier (or later!) in the loop, et cetera.
Seriously, Star Wars sucks. It's always had a large suck factor (I mean, have you ever actually listened to the dialog? It's insipid!) and it seems te be getting worse. All I want is to see my favorite bounty hunter of all time kick a little ass! It's just too bad they didn't dig up Jeremy Bulloch to play the part for this film; Boba rules.
The only thing the new Star Wars series has going for it is that Ewan McGregor is involved. Poor kid. How much would you care to bet that he feels the same way about his part that Alec Guinness did? And if he doesn't, well maybe he should. At least being the new Obi-Wan should be netting him a nice little profit if not bolstering his career a little more...
You might want to look into picking up an iBook if you're not keen on dropping $2500-3500 on the Powerbook though. I've got the 500 MHz white iBook and it runs OS X 10.1 quite well. (In fact, I am pleased enough with 10.1's performance that I don't even have OS 9 installed on disk anymore.)
You're not the only Unixhead who likes Macs, by the way... (-:
Different computers (and OSes) are better at different things. This is a fact of life and the very reason we don't have homogenous computers across the board. And I consider this a good feature of computer hardware and software. This is how we avoid monopolies, first of all, and second of all, different computing paradigms are better able to handle different kinds of jobs.
You wouldn't trust Red Hat Linux to handle the real-time calculations necessary in a nuclear power facility right now, would you?
Would you use a Sun Fire 15K to do video editing? Or to play Quake 3?
Would you rely on *BSD to provide a no-brainer (even if that means lack of customizability) easy-to-use GUI environment right out of the box?
The answer to all of those is more than likely a resounding, "no," because you've just left the domain of what each one of those computers or OSes is designed for or is really good at.
It just happens, in this case, that Macs are well suited to professional audio work (and will likely become moreso with the advent of the really nice audio APIs Apple has designed for OS X -- 1ms latency and low-level OS support for audio plugins are nice features, folks) so it's not unpragmatic to sell off your PC equipment to pick one up if you're truly serious about your field.
Or you can wait 5 years or more until Linux possibly becomes suited to the task. It's your choice.
If you're concerned about a steep learning curve in setting up a Unix machine, it really isn't as bad as you think. FreeBSD, for example, is an excellent OS and comes with extensive beginners documentation on the CD (in the form of the FreeBSD Handbook) as well as on their website that will explain all of the basics to you. Picking up an O'Reilly book like Essential System Administration and/or Unix In A Nutshell is quite helpful and will slash your learning curve to bits. Unix is really not that tough, but it does require a slightly different way of thinking.
But I digress.
In short, if you're serious about dumping IIS and want to go with something else, strongly consider Apache on Unix and not Win32. If you absolutely need to stay with Win32, you might check out Roxen which I've also had pretty good luck with, is super-easy to configure -- an area Apache can certainly use some help with -- and seems pretty solid. It is free under a GPL license, but the company that writes it also sells service contracts for it if that interests you or your bosses at all.
If you are using MacOS 9, I really highly recommend you pick up a copy of DAVE and bag setting up Netatalk. DAVE works marvellously for me (and if you ever need to burn a CD especially for your Mac on a *nix box, mkisofs understands the files DAVE uses to keep the extra metadata and resource forks that MacOS's HFS has -- quite convenient for burning CDs full of Mac software), does not have a problem with long file names, and I highly recommend it.
If you are an OS X user, either pick up a copy of Sharity if you are stuck with Mac OS X 10.0.4, or just use MacOS X 10.1 which has an included SMB client. MacOS X can also mount NFS exports, so there is always that alternative as well. I haven't had tremendous luck with Sharity, though.
But hey, if someone else wants to use MySQL, more power to them. I don't mind giving out the occasional, "I told you so." (-:
This isn't a story about encryption being denied to the masses or anything. It's about a company giving up an unprofitable product line because most people just use the free versions. And in case whoever marked this post as a troll hasn't noticed, there is a great deal of software within Ars' timeframe that is having exactly this kind of thing happening to it: free alternatives are starting to pop up.
Try to think of a commonly used commercial application that is not having a free equivalent currently being worked on. With a bit of searching, you won't find many. Indeed, free software is even becoming increasingly popular as more people are getting sick of dropping $100-700 on software per product. A comprehensive commercial software package these days can cost even more than the computer you bought to use the software on. Do you think even the rather clueless average user isn't going to notice that?
C'mon, are Slashdot moderators really this dumb?
I'm not sure I necessarily agree with this statment. Although it could well be possible, I'd also have to say that laws and personal politics had something to do with it.
Remember, back in the early '90s AT&T threw a big legal fit over some of their code still being in the BSD Unix sources. This effectively put the 386BSD and FreeBSD camps on hold for a couple of years because no one wanted to be violating AT&T's copyrights and have a screaming dog lawyer breathing down their necks. This was subsequently cleared up, of course, but it left many BSD developers quite confused.
Fortunately (or not, depending on your viewpoints I suppose if you're a true BSD bigot! *grin*) around this time, a fun little kernel project was started by the now semi-legendary Linus Torvalds in Finland. He didn't know much about kernels at the time, but didn't care for DOS and Minix didn't appeal so he set out to write his own. Linus, being quite the affable personality, quickly had quite a few people willing to help him out. Since there were no questions about AT&T's copyrights, no one was hesitant to jump in, especially with such a nice guy at the helm.
Some might go so far as to say that the Linux development community for a very long time was really a lot like a cult of personality. It likely wouldn't have mattered that the Linux kernel was licensed under the GPL or the BSD licenses; Linux would still have remained popular because Linus made such a fine benevolent dictator.
I could be wrong about all of this. Are there any early Linux developers around who would be willing to tell me that they contributed to Linux specifically because it was licensed under the GPL?
Also, I'm not convinced that the BSD license is a liability in, as you said, that it can "allow [the code] to be taken advantage of." Any code that is licensed under the BSD license never suddenly become non-free after all. There is nothing that says that if some proprietary company comes along and uses that BSD code base and then extends it to add new features and gizmos, that someone else can't do the same from the same code base and then release those changes under the BSD license as well.
This can lead to a lot of re-inventing the wheel, but in reality it doesn't usually happen THAT often. It can also greatly help with compatibility. There is a reason that BSD sockets are the defacto digital networking paradigm in the world and that is because anyone who wanted to was allowed to just yank out the BSD code from the kernel and adapt it into their OS. Heck, even Linux did this.
The same can be said for X because of it's less restrictive (as compared to the GPL) MIT license on the base source distribution from the X/Open gang. Sure, there are plenty of X implementations, and not all of them are released with source code, but all of them are generally highly interoperable.
Then again, I could just be highly delusional about all of this. ;-)
I do agree that the *BSD projects could do with a bit more self-promotion. Personally, I'd like to see OpenBSD wriggle it's way out of the security community and become more generally used. There are some very good things happening there, and some of their utilities (especially the PPP tools and the ease-of-use of most of the encryption related tools) are par excellence.