Well people expect different things from a live CD than an DOS boot floppy.
Now boot media has to support networking, and include as a full desktop environment. Imagine trying to boot dos + WFW 3.11 on floppy, plus a dialer and netscape. Not to mention people used to tweak boot floppies for their systems and not load extras.
Look at Etoile.
http://www.etoile-project.org/etoile/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
That's the gui. Now you just need to extras that make Mac OS X good (prior to leopard).
If you really want free OS X, work on these projects.
I actually started MidnightBSD to do this, but we've had some concerns about Etoile and GNUstep progress as well as our own issues. Right now I'm planning on shipping GNUstep + whatever I can get working with the OS in the next release.
imagine someone with 160GB of content (video + music) in iTunes. It doesn't work for me if i want to carry everything either.
You can't pick your top 8GB of favorites? Seriously. That's the price of combo devices.
For me, the lack of choice with mobile carriers is still a problem. I may have to go with palm or windows based devices on my next phone upgrade.
Well AMD does make chipsets with video.. ATI = AMD. I've been on an Intel only run lately myself. I gave my last AMD box to my mother over a year ago. With the exception of the original athlons, I've liked AMD chips since the K6-2 300. Their problem has always been solid chipsets. nvidia had some decent mb chipsets for AMD cpus, but since AMD bought ATI, thinks have gone sour there.
At the moment, I'd probably only consider AMD for servers, because I know there are a few good server chipsets. I tend to like AMD the best when they are the underdog, but this time the core2s are just too good.
I'd like more bandwidth as much as the next guy, but I find it odd that comcast has doubled my connection recently while sending RST packets because their network can't handle traffic. Perhaps these companies should advertise and sell what their networks can handle instead of claiming rediculous speeds that they can't provide. I also think they should offer more than a few packages. Let people pick from a wider range of packages for their needs. I'm willing to pay more for more bandwidth, but at a fixed rate that I can anticipate. If they're not willing to do that, they better provide me with a way to cap myself via the cable modem/router (business package) they provide or another method. I shouldn't have to setup my home network with traffic shaping/throttling to keep myself from paying too much. If it's a hassle for me, imagine what would happen to my mother.
Good point. The linux community needs to target startups. If the businesses start with linux, maybe they'll get tied to FOSS. This will create a demand for linux software, and we might see replacements for some of the aging windows software so many businesses use.
I am a Mac OS X sysadmin. You can do many of the same things with Mac clients that are possible in a windows world. Mac OS X server allows you to push down group or user policies, or policies based on computer (if the computer is bound to open directory). Open directory is based on LDAP. It is also possible to setup Mac clients to authenticate against active directory or Novell eDir in theory. In the latest version of Mac OS, it is very easy to bind to active directory.
It is also possible to authenticate against an open ldap server (actually osx uses open ldap) and setup kerberos. The LDAP schema (i suck with ldap) has two fields that are used to push down policies. Apple uses an XML format to describe all the policies which can be used even without OS X server.
The reason I feel that OS X is not ready for big environments is that it's inflexible. You can only hack around so many "features". For instance, we had a hack that's worked for 10.4 to bind to a Novell eDir server on campus without using Novell's schema changes for Mac support. We do not control the Novell servers. However, this appears to be broken in Leopard (10.5).
For the most part, we've had good luck migrating from a windows and mac environment to Mac only. I work for the computer science department at a university. I did not make the decision to migrate as I would have chosen BSD or maybe Linux based on our needs.
Vista does not support 4GB of memory on many systems. According to microsoft, vista only supports 4GB+ memory on 3 chipsets and all are from Intel.
I have one of these chipsets, the Intel 965. My motherboard officially supports 8GB of memory. I tried 4GB of memory with x64 vista and it caused file system corruption and complete data loss. With 3.5GB of memory the system was also unstable. I believe that the memory addressing is screwed up in terms of directx. There is a bug about double mapping address space for directx compatibility that is supposedly fixed in SP1. So if you have a video card with 512MB of RAM, vista uses an address space of 1GB (below the 4GB range). That explains why it would not work with more than 3GB of ram in my system.
More information: I have an intel DP965LT motherboard with a core 2 duo. It was x64 ultimate vista. (ubuntu couldn't boot on it either 32bit with 7.x, but 6.06 worked) The only os that worked that I tested was MidnightBSD (amd64).
I used vista for 10 months on 2.5GB of ram and it was fine. After the crash, I went back to xp because 3GB of ram is insane for it and i got 5FPS in my games by doing so. I just didn't feel like going through it again. Not to mention all the games I have that don't work. Some would have worked with 32bit vista, but not all.
The problem I see is that sony and apple will charge too much to get a large install base. Some people are willing to buy PS3s either for gaming or blue ray. In order to rule the home, they have to be in most homes. I just don't see anything at $500 doing that. Two years ago, one could predict Microsoft or Nintendo doing this. At the moment, most people are still dealing with sticker shock for gas prices.
Now if someone delivers on HD cheaply and with downloads, perhaps. I have an Apple TV, and I don't think it's ready for critical mass.
Yes, wallstreet likes to focus on the iPod, iPhone and anything that lets apple sell them. (itms, apple tv, etc) So healthy earnings in mac sales might bump it a little, but then another story about ipod saturation will kill it. I'd argue apple is a computer company, but they dropped computer from their name so who knows:)
Well you could have paid the $100 black plastic premium on the macbook. However, there are subtle differences with the specs not noticed. The macbook has gigabit ethernet for instance. To me that is valuable as I sometimes plugin to my home network which is gigabit. Running at that speed uses more power though.
Another factor is battery life. This configuration used the same sized batteries, but mac os usually has better battery life than windows. If you're running windows on it, you'll have to spring for the bigger battery (on some dell models). Apple doesn't have a different battery option so it's not possible there.
There are unique features available on both systems if you want to pay. Mac OS X has more features than windows home premium so you'd have to do vista ultimate to get comparable. (give or take a few things) You can also purchase things like integrated wireless (sprint, verizon) on dells which is very neat.
One can argue about warranties too. It's fair to say apple is comparable with other companies in some configurations and depending on needs a better value. One issue for me is that a lot of apple hardware doesn't work with various open source operating systems. The Linux kernel has only supported mac pros since like 2.6.22, and most of the BSDs are still lacking. FreeBSD 6.2+ boots on lowened apple hardware. Most people wanting to run an open source system (or dual boot) would do better with anyone but apple.
And this is why apple has to keep prices high as component prices drop. The consistency is made up at the end of the product cycle.
The argument that Mac OS is better than Vista is valid for many people. I wish I could agree with Mac OS on the server front. Dell may lose ground to apple on desktops, but not in the server space.
Your idea is brilliant, and I think the Linux community would be willing to help out a big player doing it. I know I'd work with a pc vendor if they came to me.
The Mac Mini is under $1000 and apple sells refurbs under $1000 sometimes (imacs and macbooks)
http://www.apple.com/macmini/
At first, I thought this article was talking about mac pro and macbook pro systems. It seems odd to compare the iMac with a gamer rig which is what a $1000+ pc usually is (minus workstations). I'm unclear if workstations are counted. (dell precision, mac pro, etc)
I tried that with a p3 550mhz desktop two years ago. No one would take it. Worse yet, they wanted $25 to recycle it.
The system was rather loud so my family didn't want it.
Part of the problem was the delays. They kept pushing back the release date. When it finally shipped, other games were close to the same quality and sometimes more fun to play. They would have been better off to not show it to anyone and just release the game.
I've seen about 10 at my university, mostly owned by computer science students who should know better.
However, I own an iPod and many people dislike them as well.
Consider an OS project providing a desktop system. People like small installs, but at the same time if you don't provide Qt and GTK many applications are not usable. We have to support those regardless if we move to something like GNUstep. It's a pain.
Qt 4 is actually a real pain to port because it's broken up and so large.
It's not any different for Windows. If the driver doesn't have the device id, it won't work.
The real question is what exactly do open source drivers mean. Does it mean Linux drivers? Does it mean windows drivers with source? There are big differences. If this article refers to linux drivers, it should say linux and not open source since I don't see drivers for *BSD from most companies.
If so, they're not using them right. Macs are a pain in the ass to administer. They're great for end users, so you do avoid some of the stupid calls once you've answered EVERY question about why they are different than Windows.
However, Apple's server product is an abomination. They change behavior with OS updates and you have to buy new versions to get security patches as they phase out after about 2 versions. If you consider the difference in the OS release schedule between windows and Mac OS, it is much more expensive for small deployments. If anything happens to your open directory setup, Apple will tell you to start over. If you're lucky, you were smart enough to export your users so you only have to reset the password for everyone!
Combine with that fun things like php not having any modules that are common, lack of java 6, and random crashes with Leopard Server, and you have one of the most annoying products I can think of.
The only useful thing about OS X server is the control over client systems. That is why you buy it.
At work, we have a FreeBSD webserver because we couldn't get NFS mounting to work consistently between two xserves. The FreeBSD machine has much better uptime and it's a beater Dell Precision 1.4Ghz POS. In apple happy land, you're supposed to use dynamic AFP mounts for everything. It sucks when you're trying to serve web pages!
Best of all, if a Leopard client connects to a 10.4 server, it sets an ACL on the home directory to explicitly block access by everything but the user thus blocking serving web pages! (if the user uses their webspace, it's mapped to a ~/Sites directory)
I suggest anyone looking at doing Mac deployments consider buying a real server to go with it. It could be BSD, Linux, Windows Server, even Solaris.
The problem with Macs is their inflexibility. It's great from a user perspective because it's hard to get into trouble, but when you're trying to work magic common on Windows or *NIX installs...
Yes, I'm the Mac sys admin for a university computer science department.
Getting patches upstreamed in many projects is quite difficult. It gets worse when it's not "your community." Bill's comments were obviously about licensing issues more than the ability to hack something and get it "fixed." As a BSD developer, I'd have just as much trouble getting a patch into the Linux kernel as I would with windows. Most likely both would require me to work at a large company. As an individual, I can't do much.
I've never heard anyone else say World of Warcraft works perfectly in WINE. It doesn't always work perfectly in Windows or Mac OS either. WINE is nice, but we shouldn't need it. Get Blizzard to port it to something "native" on Linux. That would be innovative.
As for your argument in general, remember how bill gates uses the word "innovate." In one example he had "Microsoft and the freedom to innovate vs the department of justice". I like to change that to "Microsoft and the department of justice vs the freedom to innovate" since nothing happened to them. (effectively)
It sounds to me that Bill Gates would like the BSD license. Our camp typically doesn't care if our code is used in commercial products. In fact, I'd take it as a compliment.
Most of what Bill Gates said was correct from the perspective of Microsoft. Consider his context versus most of us who develop and/or use open source software (OSI definition).
Bill's statement also makes me realize that he has thought a lot about open source and the impact it could have on Microsoft.
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Well people expect different things from a live CD than an DOS boot floppy.
Now boot media has to support networking, and include as a full desktop environment. Imagine trying to boot dos + WFW 3.11 on floppy, plus a dialer and netscape. Not to mention people used to tweak boot floppies for their systems and not load extras.
Look at Etoile. http://www.etoile-project.org/etoile/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page That's the gui. Now you just need to extras that make Mac OS X good (prior to leopard). If you really want free OS X, work on these projects. I actually started MidnightBSD to do this, but we've had some concerns about Etoile and GNUstep progress as well as our own issues. Right now I'm planning on shipping GNUstep + whatever I can get working with the OS in the next release.
I don't think you realize how big gnome/kde actually are.
imagine someone with 160GB of content (video + music) in iTunes. It doesn't work for me if i want to carry everything either. You can't pick your top 8GB of favorites? Seriously. That's the price of combo devices. For me, the lack of choice with mobile carriers is still a problem. I may have to go with palm or windows based devices on my next phone upgrade.
At the moment, I'd probably only consider AMD for servers, because I know there are a few good server chipsets. I tend to like AMD the best when they are the underdog, but this time the core2s are just too good.
I'd like more bandwidth as much as the next guy, but I find it odd that comcast has doubled my connection recently while sending RST packets because their network can't handle traffic. Perhaps these companies should advertise and sell what their networks can handle instead of claiming rediculous speeds that they can't provide. I also think they should offer more than a few packages. Let people pick from a wider range of packages for their needs. I'm willing to pay more for more bandwidth, but at a fixed rate that I can anticipate. If they're not willing to do that, they better provide me with a way to cap myself via the cable modem/router (business package) they provide or another method. I shouldn't have to setup my home network with traffic shaping/throttling to keep myself from paying too much. If it's a hassle for me, imagine what would happen to my mother.
Good point. The linux community needs to target startups. If the businesses start with linux, maybe they'll get tied to FOSS. This will create a demand for linux software, and we might see replacements for some of the aging windows software so many businesses use.
It is also possible to authenticate against an open ldap server (actually osx uses open ldap) and setup kerberos. The LDAP schema (i suck with ldap) has two fields that are used to push down policies. Apple uses an XML format to describe all the policies which can be used even without OS X server.
The reason I feel that OS X is not ready for big environments is that it's inflexible. You can only hack around so many "features". For instance, we had a hack that's worked for 10.4 to bind to a Novell eDir server on campus without using Novell's schema changes for Mac support. We do not control the Novell servers. However, this appears to be broken in Leopard (10.5).
For the most part, we've had good luck migrating from a windows and mac environment to Mac only. I work for the computer science department at a university. I did not make the decision to migrate as I would have chosen BSD or maybe Linux based on our needs.
I have one of these chipsets, the Intel 965. My motherboard officially supports 8GB of memory. I tried 4GB of memory with x64 vista and it caused file system corruption and complete data loss. With 3.5GB of memory the system was also unstable. I believe that the memory addressing is screwed up in terms of directx. There is a bug about double mapping address space for directx compatibility that is supposedly fixed in SP1. So if you have a video card with 512MB of RAM, vista uses an address space of 1GB (below the 4GB range). That explains why it would not work with more than 3GB of ram in my system.
More information: I have an intel DP965LT motherboard with a core 2 duo. It was x64 ultimate vista. (ubuntu couldn't boot on it either 32bit with 7.x, but 6.06 worked) The only os that worked that I tested was MidnightBSD (amd64).
I used vista for 10 months on 2.5GB of ram and it was fine. After the crash, I went back to xp because 3GB of ram is insane for it and i got 5FPS in my games by doing so. I just didn't feel like going through it again. Not to mention all the games I have that don't work. Some would have worked with 32bit vista, but not all.
The problem I see is that sony and apple will charge too much to get a large install base. Some people are willing to buy PS3s either for gaming or blue ray. In order to rule the home, they have to be in most homes. I just don't see anything at $500 doing that. Two years ago, one could predict Microsoft or Nintendo doing this. At the moment, most people are still dealing with sticker shock for gas prices. Now if someone delivers on HD cheaply and with downloads, perhaps. I have an Apple TV, and I don't think it's ready for critical mass.
Mac OS X on intel hardware is certified.
Yes, wallstreet likes to focus on the iPod, iPhone and anything that lets apple sell them. (itms, apple tv, etc) So healthy earnings in mac sales might bump it a little, but then another story about ipod saturation will kill it. I'd argue apple is a computer company, but they dropped computer from their name so who knows :)
Well you could have paid the $100 black plastic premium on the macbook. However, there are subtle differences with the specs not noticed. The macbook has gigabit ethernet for instance. To me that is valuable as I sometimes plugin to my home network which is gigabit. Running at that speed uses more power though.
Another factor is battery life. This configuration used the same sized batteries, but mac os usually has better battery life than windows. If you're running windows on it, you'll have to spring for the bigger battery (on some dell models). Apple doesn't have a different battery option so it's not possible there.
There are unique features available on both systems if you want to pay. Mac OS X has more features than windows home premium so you'd have to do vista ultimate to get comparable. (give or take a few things) You can also purchase things like integrated wireless (sprint, verizon) on dells which is very neat.
One can argue about warranties too. It's fair to say apple is comparable with other companies in some configurations and depending on needs a better value. One issue for me is that a lot of apple hardware doesn't work with various open source operating systems. The Linux kernel has only supported mac pros since like 2.6.22, and most of the BSDs are still lacking. FreeBSD 6.2+ boots on lowened apple hardware. Most people wanting to run an open source system (or dual boot) would do better with anyone but apple.
And this is why apple has to keep prices high as component prices drop. The consistency is made up at the end of the product cycle.
The argument that Mac OS is better than Vista is valid for many people. I wish I could agree with Mac OS on the server front. Dell may lose ground to apple on desktops, but not in the server space.
Your idea is brilliant, and I think the Linux community would be willing to help out a big player doing it. I know I'd work with a pc vendor if they came to me.
The Mac Mini is under $1000 and apple sells refurbs under $1000 sometimes (imacs and macbooks) http://www.apple.com/macmini/ At first, I thought this article was talking about mac pro and macbook pro systems. It seems odd to compare the iMac with a gamer rig which is what a $1000+ pc usually is (minus workstations). I'm unclear if workstations are counted. (dell precision, mac pro, etc)
I tried that with a p3 550mhz desktop two years ago. No one would take it. Worse yet, they wanted $25 to recycle it. The system was rather loud so my family didn't want it.
Part of the problem was the delays. They kept pushing back the release date. When it finally shipped, other games were close to the same quality and sometimes more fun to play. They would have been better off to not show it to anyone and just release the game.
I've seen about 10 at my university, mostly owned by computer science students who should know better. However, I own an iPod and many people dislike them as well.
Consider an OS project providing a desktop system. People like small installs, but at the same time if you don't provide Qt and GTK many applications are not usable. We have to support those regardless if we move to something like GNUstep. It's a pain. Qt 4 is actually a real pain to port because it's broken up and so large.
The first step is fixing OS X server and creating more than one server product. Expensive 1u fits all is a bit lame.
The real question is what exactly do open source drivers mean. Does it mean Linux drivers? Does it mean windows drivers with source? There are big differences. If this article refers to linux drivers, it should say linux and not open source since I don't see drivers for *BSD from most companies.
I hope you're wrong on that one or MidnightBSD is screwed. :)
If so, they're not using them right. Macs are a pain in the ass to administer. They're great for end users, so you do avoid some of the stupid calls once you've answered EVERY question about why they are different than Windows. However, Apple's server product is an abomination. They change behavior with OS updates and you have to buy new versions to get security patches as they phase out after about 2 versions. If you consider the difference in the OS release schedule between windows and Mac OS, it is much more expensive for small deployments. If anything happens to your open directory setup, Apple will tell you to start over. If you're lucky, you were smart enough to export your users so you only have to reset the password for everyone! Combine with that fun things like php not having any modules that are common, lack of java 6, and random crashes with Leopard Server, and you have one of the most annoying products I can think of. The only useful thing about OS X server is the control over client systems. That is why you buy it. At work, we have a FreeBSD webserver because we couldn't get NFS mounting to work consistently between two xserves. The FreeBSD machine has much better uptime and it's a beater Dell Precision 1.4Ghz POS. In apple happy land, you're supposed to use dynamic AFP mounts for everything. It sucks when you're trying to serve web pages! Best of all, if a Leopard client connects to a 10.4 server, it sets an ACL on the home directory to explicitly block access by everything but the user thus blocking serving web pages! (if the user uses their webspace, it's mapped to a ~/Sites directory) I suggest anyone looking at doing Mac deployments consider buying a real server to go with it. It could be BSD, Linux, Windows Server, even Solaris. The problem with Macs is their inflexibility. It's great from a user perspective because it's hard to get into trouble, but when you're trying to work magic common on Windows or *NIX installs... Yes, I'm the Mac sys admin for a university computer science department.
I've never heard anyone else say World of Warcraft works perfectly in WINE. It doesn't always work perfectly in Windows or Mac OS either. WINE is nice, but we shouldn't need it. Get Blizzard to port it to something "native" on Linux. That would be innovative.
As for your argument in general, remember how bill gates uses the word "innovate." In one example he had "Microsoft and the freedom to innovate vs the department of justice". I like to change that to "Microsoft and the department of justice vs the freedom to innovate" since nothing happened to them. (effectively)
It sounds to me that Bill Gates would like the BSD license. Our camp typically doesn't care if our code is used in commercial products. In fact, I'd take it as a compliment. Most of what Bill Gates said was correct from the perspective of Microsoft. Consider his context versus most of us who develop and/or use open source software (OSI definition). Bill's statement also makes me realize that he has thought a lot about open source and the impact it could have on Microsoft.