What makes Mac OS X useful is the gui.. including their window server, cocoa, corewhatever, etc. The low layer that is open source (corefoundation and the kernel) are a small part.
There are many options to replace the kernel including linux or say the freebsd kernel. However, the upper layers are not so easy to replace. Consider the progress of Etoile and GNUstep. The two communities are trying to give us this on X11 and it's not so easy.
The other factor is apps. If apple lost adobe apps, it would take out a big sector for them. Most mac users view some apps as pricelsss. In some cases they are on other systems but considered not as good. Even a duplicate os without the same apps wouldn't work. No one to date has ever tried to make OS X apps run directly without recompile like WINE for windows apps (AFAIK).
You buy an apple tv because you already have a collection of videos and audio in iTunes. One can argue about the cost of iTunes content, but then consider that you pay a monthly fee for tivo. An aggressive tivo user will do better with tivo, but a casual user will do better with apple tv provided the material they want is available.
I wasn't saying it was easier to port one version over another. I was thinking of the differences between releases. I assumed OpenBSD had a 3.5.x version previously.
You jest. Porting new KDE versions isn't as easy as it sounds. Most BSDs have a bunch of patches in the ports tree and they all have to be updated. It can be a lot of work. Even though OpenBSD is much bigger than MidnightBSD, they still don't have the same volume of help that some of the linux distros have for ports work.
Not to mention that many open source projects are hard to get patches upstreamed to. Some linux developers in particular give us BSD folks a hard time on that front. The more obscure you are, the worse it is. OpenBSD is not as popular to them as FreeBSD which has a difficult time with many apps too.
Re:Mebbe I should try it some time
on
OpenBSD 4.4 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Yes and don't forget the other three since you're trying to be complete:
DragonFly BSD - clustering (freebsd 4 fork) good for servers.
MirBSD - OpenBSD fork (3.x i think)
MidnightBSD - FreeBSD 6.x fork (although bringing in 7.x features now) Focused on desktop use. Not at PC-BSD usability levels yet.
MidnightBSD uses less power on my ThinkPad T30 than Windows XP SP3. I have powerd and cpufreq running which lowers battery usage significantly. FreeBSD out of the box isn't great, but it can be tweaked to be quite energy efficient.
As others pointed out, Linux has the tickless kernel option which is excellent.
Further, I would say Windows power consumption is worse because many people run antivirus or other background apps that they don't need in a *nix system.
I also noticed less power usage while plugged in. Using a kill-a-watt, I saw a 7 watt difference when the system was idle in bsd vs windows. I think this has to due with the fact that in a gui, powerd is able to get the cpu down to 450mhz in BSD but it runs much higher in windows.
The system includes a 1.6Ghz Pentium M + 512MB ram, a DVD drive and a hitatchi 120GB 5400 RPM hard drive. (it came with a 20GB drive)
I also notice gains in BSD over windows on power use on my desktop.
I would argue OS X is more vulnerable than many systems. Apple tends to be slow to patch holes in open source components of OS X like apache, php, bind, and python.
I'm saying this as an OS X admin at work. If you ant security, you use a mainstream bsd or mainstream linux distro. They have enough users to keep up on common security issues and get new packages (or ports) out.
I don't take patch counts to mean as much anymore because it might be that the developers take threats more seriously than others. If you look at redhat, they offer a lot of new updates but often they're for stupid things that aren't moderate or high priority. Microsoft tends to fix that stuff in the next version of windows if they're going to.
Many people had good experiences with their products in the past. I ran Norton since 1999 or so. At that point I was on NT4 and it worked better than the few alternatives for NT. You are also correct about marketing. Most products people mention now were not found in stores several years ago.
I got rid of it because the lowend version started incorporating their POS firewall but without configuration options. I've had nothing but bad luck with that firewall. It often gets damaged during updates and I'd rather use the built in windows firewall without any norton crap added on. Then when you combine trying to remove it, etc. It's really bad. Every year it gets worse and more expensive. I remember when you didn't have to buy a new copy every year. Those were the days.
I just wish clammwin could remove viruses. I love clamav on my mail server.
Yes, that's what time machine is for. Sadly, my mac is the best backed up machine here. I have an external seagate drive hooked up with time machine and average around a month of backup points. I also burn things on DVD twice a year I can't live without like my iTunes collection. I really wish blu-ray would pick up on Macs for backup purposes. I could backup my iTunes with 3 50GB BD discs. 135GB of data to backup on 8GB DVDs?
Tapes are cost prohibitive and optical hasn't kept up with hard drive capacity. I remember when I could backup my whole computer on 2 CDs. Now, even with BD I'd need 5 discs.
Optical discs have their own problems, but I like to have backups on at least two different types of media. Since tapes are expensive and I've had terrible luck with them professionally, I'd like to stick to optical when possible.
OS X has right click. Most macs ship with a mighty mouse with right click. I use a microsoft mouse at home and a logitech at work on my mac. No problem. This hasn't been true since at least OS 10.1 (maybe earlier). I've give you that their laptops suck on that front, but that is not the OS as it does support right click. One can bring a mouse with them.
Yeah, it will only be of benefit for recent movies and tv shows shot with good equipment. It's nice to see the players are coming down in price. I didn't understand why the PS3 was the best player at $400 when it costs that much for a player half the time without gaming features or the ability to run linux.
My wife won't let me consider Blu-ray until the players hit $200. In this economy, I don't think it's a shock people don't have $400 for a player and $30 per movie. I've had to cut back on my starbucks, so there's no way I can pull $30 out of my ass for a movie.
I don't see why you *need* vim over vi. Do you have to have colors? I don't mind using gvim from time to time, but it's not required for me to get work done.
Correction just a little over half the US went nuts. If you don't believe me look at the votng statistics for the 2004 US Presidential election. Our last two elections have been close so don't claim the whole country is crazy please.
So go to the vmware site and request FreeBSD support. There was a forum thread about it actually.
FreeBSD has two built in shells and several editors. I don't see what's so hard about pkg_add -r bash nano if you want to go GNU.
The bash port adds it to/etc/shells so chsh works. Other BSDs include different shells. For instance, OpenBSD has a modified pdksh which is decent. MidnightBSD and MirBSD include mksh. MidnightBSD also has tcsh and ash (/bin/sh is ash in freebsd too)
Dragonfly and MidnightBSD include mined as an alternate editor as well.
The linuxolator has trouble running modern virtualization environments. Not all the system calls are available to do so. For instance, vmware wont' run after like version 3. VirtualBox is a real pain to port and most other products don't work right.
I understand the frustration of apple's decisions with many but some of these comments make no sense to me.
The iPhone has some stricter restrictions, but it's a platform just as mac os or windows is a platform. Apple and Microsoft can break an API and kill your app. If you don't believe me, pull out a game designed for windows 98 and run it on vista. Many will not work and some will. It depends what the developer did.
The BSD and Linux community has control too. Most BSD projects are run by one person. In the case of FreeBSD and NetBSD it is a group of people but they make the calls. This isn't that different from a company in control of a product. We're just more open to get developers to help us. We have to be. Apple has gained market share and they don't think they need anyone right now. That might change in the future.
In the case of Linux, Linus makes the final call on changes to the kernel. He can require things get backed out, etc. The GNOME team might keep Firefox as the default browser to build it on because Mozilla gave them funding. A company is directly interfering with open source if that were the case. IBM has people working on Linux to get their stuff to work. That is a company involved too. Don't you think IBM's patches would be more important than some guy in idaho? Think about it.
It's fine to want open platforms, but the freedom that open source gives you is that you can take the code and go your own path if needed. It doesn't give you an open platform if you stick to the mainline in all cases.
The record companies offer another service, marketing. Granted, many people are successful by advertising their own tunes online via youtube, myspace, etc. However, not everyone is good at selling themselves. I think the record companies could adapt to become marketing companies and retain a revenue stream.
The other problem we have is that everyone is in a rush to get rid of physical media thinking it's a good thing. There are down sides. With DRM, we will only get a few companies selling content which means less competition and higher prices. Best Buy runs sales on CDs to get people in the store. Without media, Best Buy will need to find another way to do that and we won't get cheaper music. There's also the loss of jobs to consider. Many CDs are pressed outside the US, but there are still employees at stores like best buy, etc.
This doesn't mean I'm against digital media as I purchase a lot of things online via iTunes and Amazon even knowing the DRM restrictions. I am part of the problem too.
Finally, I don't think video is there yet in terms of online distribution. For instance, I got a free HD episode of Monk off iTunes the other day. It doesn't look any better than my DVDs and my wife felt it looked much worse. The technology is there, but it's not being used.
The statement was wrong overall, but there are large parts of FreeBSD 5.x code in the userland and to a lesser degree the kernel. Look at a manpage if you don't believe me. You can also look at code releases on apple's open source site.
I wish both KDE and GNOME would consolidate on some low level services and libraries that are shared. The top layers can be whatever and experiment with different environments. That would be a good thing.
The first step to improve GNOME is to make webkit the default library for the tons of HTML rendering needed in that UI. If you look at the dependancies, a lot of GNOME depends on browser code which I disagree with. At least with KDE, it's their code instead of Mozilla. If you don't see why this is a problem, support it on a non linux platform that isn't blessed yet by Mozilla.
Many people have complaints about KDE 4, and mine is trying to get QT4 to compile. Both environments have problems. Documentation and UI improvements are badly needed in the open source space. My own project has real problems in that area too so I take responsibility as much as the next guy (should).
I think all isps should be required to let you get this data whenever you want. It's not just so you can avoid caps, but to see if you've got infected machines, etc. If the number is way out there, you know something is wrong.
I do monitor traffic at home, but many people don't know how to do this. Going to a nice website would be helpful.
There's a difference. The average person can point to the service they get from your examples. In fact, there is something physical about each of those examples.
Google sells virtual ads. That is their product. Is an advertising company worth that much? I think not.
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What makes Mac OS X useful is the gui.. including their window server, cocoa, corewhatever, etc. The low layer that is open source (corefoundation and the kernel) are a small part.
There are many options to replace the kernel including linux or say the freebsd kernel. However, the upper layers are not so easy to replace. Consider the progress of Etoile and GNUstep. The two communities are trying to give us this on X11 and it's not so easy.
The other factor is apps. If apple lost adobe apps, it would take out a big sector for them. Most mac users view some apps as pricelsss. In some cases they are on other systems but considered not as good. Even a duplicate os without the same apps wouldn't work. No one to date has ever tried to make OS X apps run directly without recompile like WINE for windows apps (AFAIK).
You buy an apple tv because you already have a collection of videos and audio in iTunes. One can argue about the cost of iTunes content, but then consider that you pay a monthly fee for tivo. An aggressive tivo user will do better with tivo, but a casual user will do better with apple tv provided the material they want is available.
I wasn't saying it was easier to port one version over another. I was thinking of the differences between releases. I assumed OpenBSD had a 3.5.x version previously.
You jest. Porting new KDE versions isn't as easy as it sounds. Most BSDs have a bunch of patches in the ports tree and they all have to be updated. It can be a lot of work. Even though OpenBSD is much bigger than MidnightBSD, they still don't have the same volume of help that some of the linux distros have for ports work.
Not to mention that many open source projects are hard to get patches upstreamed to. Some linux developers in particular give us BSD folks a hard time on that front. The more obscure you are, the worse it is. OpenBSD is not as popular to them as FreeBSD which has a difficult time with many apps too.
Yes and don't forget the other three since you're trying to be complete:
DragonFly BSD - clustering (freebsd 4 fork) good for servers.
MirBSD - OpenBSD fork (3.x i think)
MidnightBSD - FreeBSD 6.x fork (although bringing in 7.x features now) Focused on desktop use. Not at PC-BSD usability levels yet.
OS X is not usable with 512MB ram. That isn't enough ram for Mail.app. Sadly, Mail.app is my reference app for when I need a new Mac.
MidnightBSD uses less power on my ThinkPad T30 than Windows XP SP3. I have powerd and cpufreq running which lowers battery usage significantly. FreeBSD out of the box isn't great, but it can be tweaked to be quite energy efficient.
As others pointed out, Linux has the tickless kernel option which is excellent.
Further, I would say Windows power consumption is worse because many people run antivirus or other background apps that they don't need in a *nix system.
I also noticed less power usage while plugged in. Using a kill-a-watt, I saw a 7 watt difference when the system was idle in bsd vs windows. I think this has to due with the fact that in a gui, powerd is able to get the cpu down to 450mhz in BSD but it runs much higher in windows.
The system includes a 1.6Ghz Pentium M + 512MB ram, a DVD drive and a hitatchi 120GB 5400 RPM hard drive. (it came with a 20GB drive)
I also notice gains in BSD over windows on power use on my desktop.
I would argue OS X is more vulnerable than many systems. Apple tends to be slow to patch holes in open source components of OS X like apache, php, bind, and python.
I'm saying this as an OS X admin at work. If you ant security, you use a mainstream bsd or mainstream linux distro. They have enough users to keep up on common security issues and get new packages (or ports) out.
I don't take patch counts to mean as much anymore because it might be that the developers take threats more seriously than others. If you look at redhat, they offer a lot of new updates but often they're for stupid things that aren't moderate or high priority. Microsoft tends to fix that stuff in the next version of windows if they're going to.
Many people had good experiences with their products in the past. I ran Norton since 1999 or so. At that point I was on NT4 and it worked better than the few alternatives for NT. You are also correct about marketing. Most products people mention now were not found in stores several years ago.
I got rid of it because the lowend version started incorporating their POS firewall but without configuration options. I've had nothing but bad luck with that firewall. It often gets damaged during updates and I'd rather use the built in windows firewall without any norton crap added on. Then when you combine trying to remove it, etc. It's really bad. Every year it gets worse and more expensive. I remember when you didn't have to buy a new copy every year. Those were the days.
I just wish clammwin could remove viruses. I love clamav on my mail server.
Yes, that's what time machine is for. Sadly, my mac is the best backed up machine here. I have an external seagate drive hooked up with time machine and average around a month of backup points. I also burn things on DVD twice a year I can't live without like my iTunes collection. I really wish blu-ray would pick up on Macs for backup purposes. I could backup my iTunes with 3 50GB BD discs. 135GB of data to backup on 8GB DVDs?
Tapes are cost prohibitive and optical hasn't kept up with hard drive capacity. I remember when I could backup my whole computer on 2 CDs. Now, even with BD I'd need 5 discs.
Optical discs have their own problems, but I like to have backups on at least two different types of media. Since tapes are expensive and I've had terrible luck with them professionally, I'd like to stick to optical when possible.
I doubt it. The parent company sells stuff on iTunes and apple won't blow that.
OS X has right click. Most macs ship with a mighty mouse with right click. I use a microsoft mouse at home and a logitech at work on my mac. No problem. This hasn't been true since at least OS 10.1 (maybe earlier). I've give you that their laptops suck on that front, but that is not the OS as it does support right click. One can bring a mouse with them.
Yeah, it will only be of benefit for recent movies and tv shows shot with good equipment. It's nice to see the players are coming down in price. I didn't understand why the PS3 was the best player at $400 when it costs that much for a player half the time without gaming features or the ability to run linux.
My wife won't let me consider Blu-ray until the players hit $200. In this economy, I don't think it's a shock people don't have $400 for a player and $30 per movie. I've had to cut back on my starbucks, so there's no way I can pull $30 out of my ass for a movie.
ok so pkg_add -r vim
I don't see why you *need* vim over vi. Do you have to have colors? I don't mind using gvim from time to time, but it's not required for me to get work done.
Correction just a little over half the US went nuts. If you don't believe me look at the votng statistics for the 2004 US Presidential election. Our last two elections have been close so don't claim the whole country is crazy please.
So go to the vmware site and request FreeBSD support. There was a forum thread about it actually.
FreeBSD has two built in shells and several editors. I don't see what's so hard about pkg_add -r bash nano if you want to go GNU.
The bash port adds it to /etc/shells so chsh works. Other BSDs include different shells. For instance, OpenBSD has a modified pdksh which is decent. MidnightBSD and MirBSD include mksh. MidnightBSD also has tcsh and ash (/bin/sh is ash in freebsd too)
Dragonfly and MidnightBSD include mined as an alternate editor as well.
The linuxolator has trouble running modern virtualization environments. Not all the system calls are available to do so. For instance, vmware wont' run after like version 3. VirtualBox is a real pain to port and most other products don't work right.
That is not the linux kernel but rather just some userland crap running on the linuxolator. This is not even close to the same thing.
I understand the frustration of apple's decisions with many but some of these comments make no sense to me.
The iPhone has some stricter restrictions, but it's a platform just as mac os or windows is a platform. Apple and Microsoft can break an API and kill your app. If you don't believe me, pull out a game designed for windows 98 and run it on vista. Many will not work and some will. It depends what the developer did.
The BSD and Linux community has control too. Most BSD projects are run by one person. In the case of FreeBSD and NetBSD it is a group of people but they make the calls. This isn't that different from a company in control of a product. We're just more open to get developers to help us. We have to be. Apple has gained market share and they don't think they need anyone right now. That might change in the future.
In the case of Linux, Linus makes the final call on changes to the kernel. He can require things get backed out, etc. The GNOME team might keep Firefox as the default browser to build it on because Mozilla gave them funding. A company is directly interfering with open source if that were the case. IBM has people working on Linux to get their stuff to work. That is a company involved too. Don't you think IBM's patches would be more important than some guy in idaho? Think about it.
It's fine to want open platforms, but the freedom that open source gives you is that you can take the code and go your own path if needed. It doesn't give you an open platform if you stick to the mainline in all cases.
She was a prize pig, but only got second place. (VP and beauty contest)
The record companies offer another service, marketing. Granted, many people are successful by advertising their own tunes online via youtube, myspace, etc. However, not everyone is good at selling themselves. I think the record companies could adapt to become marketing companies and retain a revenue stream.
The other problem we have is that everyone is in a rush to get rid of physical media thinking it's a good thing. There are down sides. With DRM, we will only get a few companies selling content which means less competition and higher prices. Best Buy runs sales on CDs to get people in the store. Without media, Best Buy will need to find another way to do that and we won't get cheaper music. There's also the loss of jobs to consider. Many CDs are pressed outside the US, but there are still employees at stores like best buy, etc.
This doesn't mean I'm against digital media as I purchase a lot of things online via iTunes and Amazon even knowing the DRM restrictions. I am part of the problem too.
Finally, I don't think video is there yet in terms of online distribution. For instance, I got a free HD episode of Monk off iTunes the other day. It doesn't look any better than my DVDs and my wife felt it looked much worse. The technology is there, but it's not being used.
The statement was wrong overall, but there are large parts of FreeBSD 5.x code in the userland and to a lesser degree the kernel. Look at a manpage if you don't believe me. You can also look at code releases on apple's open source site.
I wish both KDE and GNOME would consolidate on some low level services and libraries that are shared. The top layers can be whatever and experiment with different environments. That would be a good thing.
The first step to improve GNOME is to make webkit the default library for the tons of HTML rendering needed in that UI. If you look at the dependancies, a lot of GNOME depends on browser code which I disagree with. At least with KDE, it's their code instead of Mozilla. If you don't see why this is a problem, support it on a non linux platform that isn't blessed yet by Mozilla.
Many people have complaints about KDE 4, and mine is trying to get QT4 to compile. Both environments have problems. Documentation and UI improvements are badly needed in the open source space. My own project has real problems in that area too so I take responsibility as much as the next guy (should).
I think all isps should be required to let you get this data whenever you want. It's not just so you can avoid caps, but to see if you've got infected machines, etc. If the number is way out there, you know something is wrong.
I do monitor traffic at home, but many people don't know how to do this. Going to a nice website would be helpful.
There's a difference. The average person can point to the service they get from your examples. In fact, there is something physical about each of those examples.
Google sells virtual ads. That is their product. Is an advertising company worth that much? I think not.