Well from a quick search without details, wouldn't it seem like Redhat and NetBSD are similar. They both create open source operating system products. One is a company and the other is a non profit.
As another example, consider Google and Mozilla. They both make web browsers that are open source. To make things more confusing, Google has given money to Mozilla for their browser. Doesn't that look suspect from the outside without all the facts?
FreeBSD is a great example of open source working. Not only has it been successful, but it has spawned a lot of other open source projects such as GhostBSD, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, DragonFly, pfsense, freenas, nanobsd, and my own MidnightBSD.
There are a lot of people who have donated a lot of time to FreeBSD. This wouldn't have happened without all the committers and folks offering patches to the project. FreeBSD and all the other projects I mentioned wouldn't be here without the. Thanks!
Or maybe he has. PostgreSQL is slow for inserts. I feel like a broken record at this point, but it's true. If you use COPY it's fast. If you wrap a ton of inserts in a single transaction it is mediocre. If you try to use it with an ORM, you're SOL.
If you do a lot of hacks like force vacuums, use COPY and other craziness, you can get performance out of pg. Don't even try to run it on a hard drive. Anyone who says it's fast is using a lot of enterprise SSD and they don't notice how painfully slow it is writing out transactions, etc.
I might be stuck porting to PostgreSQL or MariaDB now as this MySQL licensing situation with Oracle is getting out of control. I've been highly resistant to change, but I think it might be time.
You're making assumptions about how I use a computer that you shouldn't make. Unlike most people, I am often CPU bound. Upgrading the CPUs was necessary in order to actually read my email. Upgrading the video card allowed me to view flash content again and even play some games.
While you're correct in that I wouldn't have the latest amazing things, consider that apple didn't do much to Mac Pro systems. The Mac Pro I was using was a hand-me-down from my wife buying a new one at the time. Sure, she got faster RAM and a faster pciE slot and new CPUs, but many other aspects of the Mac Pro were unchanged. The first and second revisions of the Mac Pro were identical except for a CPU bump and an update to EFI.
I'm going to have to disagree. The Mac Pro was the only system that you could upgrade. In my last system, I upgraded the CPUs (2x2 5100 series to 2x4 5300 series xeons), radeon video card, ram, and hard drives. This new model is not upgradable. It has no storage bays. It means it is a glorified mac mini requiring a shit load of external hard drives to actually use time machine + store content.
Why apple thinks a bunch of external crap is prettier than internal drive bays, I'll never know.
This reminds me of PBI from PC-BSD. Others have pointed out the similarities with Apple / NeXT as well.
For simple applications, it makes sense to do this. However, imagine creating a package for something large like firefox, libreoffice or kde? WIth the mass number of dependencies... it's a nightmare. Do I really need hundreds of copies of a PNG library on my system? What about zlib? gtk+ ?
I don't know about OpenBSD, but I can say that it's been much easier to port KDE 3 than KDE 4.x on MidnightBSD. QT4 isn't bad, but a few of the KDE bits are a real hassle. They may have to port a lot of support code first to get it running. I don't think people realize the amount of work it takes to port KDE and GNOME. They are huge.
The great thing about HTML5 is that it runs on many devices unlike Silverlight. With HTML5, there is a chance that I can actually stream content on my tablet, *BSD or Linux computer, Windows, Mac, iPhone, or consoles in my home. Netflix managed to get Wii, PS3, iPhone, iPad, etc. to stream their content so obviously they can already do it without silverlight. With both flash and silverlight dying, netflix has to find a solution to this problem.
As someone who's been trying to do a desktop BSD based OS for several years, I cannot recommend it for general use yet.
On the FreeBSD front, if your computer has Intel or NVIDIA graphics and it's not one of those crappy pseudo NVIDIA cards found in new laptops, you might be OK on video with simply installing a driver and configuring X. If you have AMD/ATI graphics newer than the 4000 series, run away. You'll get VESA mode.
For WIFI, anything older than FreeBSD 9 is terrible. Many WIFI chips with 802.11n don't work. USB bus devices don't work on FreeBSD 7.x with some working in 8 and many working in 9.
Sound card support is a mixed bag. PC-BSD was unable to detect the sound card in my Toshiba laptop. To be fair, Debian didn't work either until I went to unstable and did a lot of hacks.
PC-BSD has switched from a KDE distro of FreeBSD to a desktop neutral product. They're migrating from their current package management system to pkgng. When things settle down, it may be a good choice, but right now you could have serious upgrade pains.
Having said all this, I successfully used FreeBSD at two different jobs over several years as a desktop workstation. I'm a computer programmer that has worked with Java, PHP and Perl in the past and it was a great fit. I used KDE for my desktop environment and OpenOffice. Flash worked most of the time, thunderbird and firefox worked fine and Chromium is even available now. For work purposes, it was fine.
At home, I find *BSD to be lacking right now for consuming content. It's not even as good as Linux at running WINE so many windows apps don't work. There aren't enough alternatives running natively to work around things. I'd love to be in a open format utopia, but it's not reality and I like many people have bought iTunes and Steam content using DRM. Steam for Linux is a reality, but not steam for BSD.
Here's where your argument falls apart. By the logic you're using, if a company makes money on copyright infringement they should be stopped. What about all the PCs and Macs used to pirate movies, rip songs, etc? One can argue early versions of iTunes and Windows Media Player/encoder were used to pirate content. What about the MP3 codecs? How many people used them for legitimate purposes early on? P2P technology is another example. Blizzard distributes patches using P2P, but most of it's use is to pirate movies, music and software. Should all P2P software providers be shut down even though Blizzard and the Linux community have decided to use it for good?
Technology is not bad in itself. Youtube is a platform for distributing content. Some users choose to use it for evil. Mega Upload was the same thing. It was a convenient service. What got him into trouble was how he was storing the content. By keeping one copy, it was easy to argue that when a request came in that he should remove all user's instances of the file. However, he wouldn't know if any of those users had a legitimate claim to have the file. From a technical perspective, it was just dedup at a simple level, but business people don't get that.
Mega is a slimy guy, and he was at the line, but I don't think he crossed it with both feet.
Copyright infringement comes down to one thing, as a society do we want free access to art or do we want to only allow the privileged who can afford it, to have access.
netatalk is in ports. It's an AFP implementation. It worked well with Classic and old versions of OS X, but I've had better luck with Samba mounts in the last few releases. However, you still need it for TimeMachine.
I just wish the PHP guys would actually put some of those useful comments in the documentation at the top. How many times have I had to look at the comments below to find out how something really works or that it's broken in 5.1.6 but magically works in 5.2, etc.
In order to do that, they'd have to do a lot of work on graphics drivers. FreeBSD has nvidia binary blobs and decent support for Intel graphics in recent releases, but AMD/ATI graphics are a joke.
If you want to boot linux fast, get the mac mini instead or an iMac. The ancient xeons in the Mac Pro are dated at this point. Some benchmarks indicate the ivy bridge chips in the "lowend" macs are faster, especially compared to the entry mac pro.
I replaced a mac pro with a mini in december and it's been a big upgrade except for disk. Now I've got a bunch of USB enclosures all over my desk to make up for the loss of disks, but at least it's got USB3. I don't get people who prefer this... having the drives inside the computer is so much less clutter.
Their appearance was similar. There are many changes in 98SE that proved to be both good and bad. It had better support for USB and AGP video cards, but it also enabled full PNP. PCI cards would go wherever they wanted and it was not uncommon for half the devices in your system to be on the same IRQ. It was tolerable unless you had buggy hardware like the Acer laptop I had or an AMD CPU + via chipset motherboard.
I had to reinstall 98SE every three months and I only used it for gaming. It would blue screen randomly. It was a flaming pile.
Conversely, NT4 SP3+ was a nice OS with only one flaw. Drivers could kill the kernel way to easily. Iomega's zip drive drivers were quite bad as were some scsi controllers.
The author did a poor job of listing most BSDs accomplishments and fails to mention many projects of interest in the community.
GhostBSD, pfSense, Monowall are all interesting projects and then there's my project MidnightBSD and MirBSD.
In general, I think there's interesting projects related to file systems, IPv6, compiler work, and virtualization happening in many of the BSDs. Some BSDs are going to GPLv3 binutils and GCC (DragonFly, NetBSD). Others are using LLVM+clang (FreeBSD, MidnightBSD) and then others are looking at PCC (MirBSD, OpenBSD?)
DragonFly's HAMMER file systems are interesting as is the work to port ZFS to FreeBSD that's matured nicely. BHyVE virtualization on FreeBSD and XEN on NetBSD are nice.
I think you forget history. When the iPhone first came out there weren't a lot of cool phones for geeks. Windows phones were a joke. Blackberry phones were sort of interesting but if you didn't want a hand cramp it was out. Palm phones were kind of neat, but they couldn't actually do much. The iPhone was cool and innovative.
I just upgraded to an iPhone 5 from an iPhone 4. There were only a few things that even made me bother:
1. Siri 2. 4G 3. Better cameras
That was it. 4G was worth it, the rest not so much. I could have gotten most of this with Android and I did look at Sony and Samsung devices. I almost bought an android phone this time. The ecosystem investment was the ONLY reason I didn't do it. At some point, even that won't stop me. Apple needs a wake up call. I like the iPhone 5, but I don't think of it as innovative, just a minor bump in the upgrade cycle.
I have quite a few apple products in my home and I'm starting to see a pattern.
I had a first gen apple tv. I upgraded to a second gen apple tv. It was a big upgrade.. smaller, faster, netflix streaming. The third gen is the second gen with 1080p. That's it.
I had an iPhone 3G. The iPhone 4 was a big upgrade in performance and video camera support. The iPhone 5 only gave me 4G and Siri. Weak.
My wife had an original Mac Pro. The case on the current model is the same. It's still the same CPU socket 7 years later. The current model video cards can be used in the original. Beyond DDR3 RAM and faster chips, it's the same computer today. She has an 8 core dual socket model now and I retired the original as a Mac MINI was faster on many benchmarks and it's actually an ivy bridge chip. Fail when the $700 computer beats the $2500 computer. Tim Cook might have an answer this year... but europe can't even buy them next month. Let's face it he's going to kill workstations.
Xserve: dead
OS X server: practically dead
Pro products: dead
Apple is turning into the iPad company and those things aren't even innovative compared to android devices. When apple pushes ahead on hardware, samsung (their part supplier) just ships a new model the following month. The software on an ipad is nice, but not much better than android in many ways.
Don't even get me started on the build quality problems with new macs.
I don't think less people are using Perl. I think young people aren't using perl. The hot thing is Python and JavaScript solutions for everything. Python can be used for GUIs, crazy admin scripts, etc. It can be used in place of Perl, but it will never replace Perl. Python doesn't have CPAN. Python code is just as bad as Perl code sometimes, because people who use both languages are sometimes too clever for their own good. Personally, Perl makes more sense to me than Python. I get why people like Python, but it's not for me. After trying to port it to MidnightBSD, I had to look inside and I was not impressed. Then there's the whole Python 3 thing... too many people still use Python 2.x. Python 3 is what will happen if Perl ever actually goes to 6.0 (mainstream). You'll have a fork and then death of the language long term. It's only a matter of time. I think the Python community either has to go back to 2.x or kill security updates on it so it forces people to adopt 3.x.
No one has ever shown me a feature in Python I can't live without. I would never write a GUI in Perl, but I also think it's ridiculous in python aside from prototyping. If you want evidence of why I feel that way, look at many Gnome projects. I have done it once as a script to create PDFs of web pages with their actual rendering from WebKit bindings for my previous employer and I got a bad taste in my mouth.
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Well from a quick search without details, wouldn't it seem like Redhat and NetBSD are similar. They both create open source operating system products. One is a company and the other is a non profit.
As another example, consider Google and Mozilla. They both make web browsers that are open source. To make things more confusing, Google has given money to Mozilla for their browser. Doesn't that look suspect from the outside without all the facts?
I can see why the IRS might be confused.
FreeBSD is a great example of open source working. Not only has it been successful, but it has spawned a lot of other open source projects such as GhostBSD, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, DragonFly, pfsense, freenas, nanobsd, and my own MidnightBSD.
There are a lot of people who have donated a lot of time to FreeBSD. This wouldn't have happened without all the committers and folks offering patches to the project. FreeBSD and all the other projects I mentioned wouldn't be here without the. Thanks!
Or maybe he has. PostgreSQL is slow for inserts. I feel like a broken record at this point, but it's true. If you use COPY it's fast. If you wrap a ton of inserts in a single transaction it is mediocre. If you try to use it with an ORM, you're SOL.
If you do a lot of hacks like force vacuums, use COPY and other craziness, you can get performance out of pg. Don't even try to run it on a hard drive. Anyone who says it's fast is using a lot of enterprise SSD and they don't notice how painfully slow it is writing out transactions, etc.
I might be stuck porting to PostgreSQL or MariaDB now as this MySQL licensing situation with Oracle is getting out of control. I've been highly resistant to change, but I think it might be time.
You're making assumptions about how I use a computer that you shouldn't make. Unlike most people, I am often CPU bound. Upgrading the CPUs was necessary in order to actually read my email. Upgrading the video card allowed me to view flash content again and even play some games.
While you're correct in that I wouldn't have the latest amazing things, consider that apple didn't do much to Mac Pro systems. The Mac Pro I was using was a hand-me-down from my wife buying a new one at the time. Sure, she got faster RAM and a faster pciE slot and new CPUs, but many other aspects of the Mac Pro were unchanged. The first and second revisions of the Mac Pro were identical except for a CPU bump and an update to EFI.
I'm going to have to disagree. The Mac Pro was the only system that you could upgrade. In my last system, I upgraded the CPUs (2x2 5100 series to 2x4 5300 series xeons), radeon video card, ram, and hard drives. This new model is not upgradable. It has no storage bays. It means it is a glorified mac mini requiring a shit load of external hard drives to actually use time machine + store content.
Why apple thinks a bunch of external crap is prettier than internal drive bays, I'll never know.
My Mac has X on it. It came with OSX as an optional install until recent releases and it's still a free download.
Mac doesn't necessarily mean no X. In fact, some programs REQUIRE IT like some high end math stat programs.
Ballmer's idea of delivering a chair is about like Ace Ventura delivering a package.
Well even before there was a PBI, one could use the FreeBSD ports collection on PC-BSD to install VirtualBox.
This reminds me of PBI from PC-BSD. Others have pointed out the similarities with Apple / NeXT as well.
For simple applications, it makes sense to do this. However, imagine creating a package for something large like firefox, libreoffice or kde? WIth the mass number of dependencies... it's a nightmare. Do I really need hundreds of copies of a PNG library on my system? What about zlib? gtk+ ?
It got better.
Oh come on.. they have more developers than I have. Can't I have the dying BSD desktop project this year?
I'd rather see them experience the BSOD. The NT4 driver was terrible for their parallel zip drives.
I don't know about OpenBSD, but I can say that it's been much easier to port KDE 3 than KDE 4.x on MidnightBSD. QT4 isn't bad, but a few of the KDE bits are a real hassle. They may have to port a lot of support code first to get it running. I don't think people realize the amount of work it takes to port KDE and GNOME. They are huge.
The great thing about HTML5 is that it runs on many devices unlike Silverlight. With HTML5, there is a chance that I can actually stream content on my tablet, *BSD or Linux computer, Windows, Mac, iPhone, or consoles in my home. Netflix managed to get Wii, PS3, iPhone, iPad, etc. to stream their content so obviously they can already do it without silverlight. With both flash and silverlight dying, netflix has to find a solution to this problem.
Well you don't expect the guy to buy a Samsung do you?
Not only is this funny, it's the sad truth.
As someone who's been trying to do a desktop BSD based OS for several years, I cannot recommend it for general use yet.
On the FreeBSD front, if your computer has Intel or NVIDIA graphics and it's not one of those crappy pseudo NVIDIA cards found in new laptops, you might be OK on video with simply installing a driver and configuring X. If you have AMD/ATI graphics newer than the 4000 series, run away. You'll get VESA mode.
For WIFI, anything older than FreeBSD 9 is terrible. Many WIFI chips with 802.11n don't work. USB bus devices don't work on FreeBSD 7.x with some working in 8 and many working in 9.
Sound card support is a mixed bag. PC-BSD was unable to detect the sound card in my Toshiba laptop. To be fair, Debian didn't work either until I went to unstable and did a lot of hacks.
PC-BSD has switched from a KDE distro of FreeBSD to a desktop neutral product. They're migrating from their current package management system to pkgng. When things settle down, it may be a good choice, but right now you could have serious upgrade pains.
Having said all this, I successfully used FreeBSD at two different jobs over several years as a desktop workstation. I'm a computer programmer that has worked with Java, PHP and Perl in the past and it was a great fit. I used KDE for my desktop environment and OpenOffice. Flash worked most of the time, thunderbird and firefox worked fine and Chromium is even available now. For work purposes, it was fine.
At home, I find *BSD to be lacking right now for consuming content. It's not even as good as Linux at running WINE so many windows apps don't work. There aren't enough alternatives running natively to work around things. I'd love to be in a open format utopia, but it's not reality and I like many people have bought iTunes and Steam content using DRM. Steam for Linux is a reality, but not steam for BSD.
Here's where your argument falls apart. By the logic you're using, if a company makes money on copyright infringement they should be stopped. What about all the PCs and Macs used to pirate movies, rip songs, etc? One can argue early versions of iTunes and Windows Media Player/encoder were used to pirate content. What about the MP3 codecs? How many people used them for legitimate purposes early on? P2P technology is another example. Blizzard distributes patches using P2P, but most of it's use is to pirate movies, music and software. Should all P2P software providers be shut down even though Blizzard and the Linux community have decided to use it for good?
Technology is not bad in itself. Youtube is a platform for distributing content. Some users choose to use it for evil. Mega Upload was the same thing. It was a convenient service. What got him into trouble was how he was storing the content. By keeping one copy, it was easy to argue that when a request came in that he should remove all user's instances of the file. However, he wouldn't know if any of those users had a legitimate claim to have the file. From a technical perspective, it was just dedup at a simple level, but business people don't get that.
Mega is a slimy guy, and he was at the line, but I don't think he crossed it with both feet.
Copyright infringement comes down to one thing, as a society do we want free access to art or do we want to only allow the privileged who can afford it, to have access.
netatalk is in ports. It's an AFP implementation. It worked well with Classic and old versions of OS X, but I've had better luck with Samba mounts in the last few releases. However, you still need it for TimeMachine.
I just wish the PHP guys would actually put some of those useful comments in the documentation at the top. How many times have I had to look at the comments below to find out how something really works or that it's broken in 5.1.6 but magically works in 5.2, etc.
In order to do that, they'd have to do a lot of work on graphics drivers. FreeBSD has nvidia binary blobs and decent support for Intel graphics in recent releases, but AMD/ATI graphics are a joke.
If you want to boot linux fast, get the mac mini instead or an iMac. The ancient xeons in the Mac Pro are dated at this point. Some benchmarks indicate the ivy bridge chips in the "lowend" macs are faster, especially compared to the entry mac pro.
I replaced a mac pro with a mini in december and it's been a big upgrade except for disk. Now I've got a bunch of USB enclosures all over my desk to make up for the loss of disks, but at least it's got USB3. I don't get people who prefer this... having the drives inside the computer is so much less clutter.
Their appearance was similar. There are many changes in 98SE that proved to be both good and bad. It had better support for USB and AGP video cards, but it also enabled full PNP. PCI cards would go wherever they wanted and it was not uncommon for half the devices in your system to be on the same IRQ. It was tolerable unless you had buggy hardware like the Acer laptop I had or an AMD CPU + via chipset motherboard.
I had to reinstall 98SE every three months and I only used it for gaming. It would blue screen randomly. It was a flaming pile.
Conversely, NT4 SP3+ was a nice OS with only one flaw. Drivers could kill the kernel way to easily. Iomega's zip drive drivers were quite bad as were some scsi controllers.
The author did a poor job of listing most BSDs accomplishments and fails to mention many projects of interest in the community.
GhostBSD, pfSense, Monowall are all interesting projects and then there's my project MidnightBSD and MirBSD.
In general, I think there's interesting projects related to file systems, IPv6, compiler work, and virtualization happening in many of the BSDs. Some BSDs are going to GPLv3 binutils and GCC (DragonFly, NetBSD). Others are using LLVM+clang (FreeBSD, MidnightBSD) and then others are looking at PCC (MirBSD, OpenBSD?)
DragonFly's HAMMER file systems are interesting as is the work to port ZFS to FreeBSD that's matured nicely. BHyVE virtualization on FreeBSD and XEN on NetBSD are nice.
There's a lot happening.
I think you forget history. When the iPhone first came out there weren't a lot of cool phones for geeks. Windows phones were a joke. Blackberry phones were sort of interesting but if you didn't want a hand cramp it was out. Palm phones were kind of neat, but they couldn't actually do much. The iPhone was cool and innovative.
I just upgraded to an iPhone 5 from an iPhone 4. There were only a few things that even made me bother:
1. Siri
2. 4G
3. Better cameras
That was it. 4G was worth it, the rest not so much. I could have gotten most of this with Android and I did look at Sony and Samsung devices. I almost bought an android phone this time. The ecosystem investment was the ONLY reason I didn't do it. At some point, even that won't stop me. Apple needs a wake up call. I like the iPhone 5, but I don't think of it as innovative, just a minor bump in the upgrade cycle.
I have quite a few apple products in my home and I'm starting to see a pattern.
I had a first gen apple tv. I upgraded to a second gen apple tv. It was a big upgrade.. smaller, faster, netflix streaming. The third gen is the second gen with 1080p. That's it.
I had an iPhone 3G. The iPhone 4 was a big upgrade in performance and video camera support. The iPhone 5 only gave me 4G and Siri. Weak.
My wife had an original Mac Pro. The case on the current model is the same. It's still the same CPU socket 7 years later. The current model video cards can be used in the original. Beyond DDR3 RAM and faster chips, it's the same computer today. She has an 8 core dual socket model now and I retired the original as a Mac MINI was faster on many benchmarks and it's actually an ivy bridge chip. Fail when the $700 computer beats the $2500 computer. Tim Cook might have an answer this year... but europe can't even buy them next month. Let's face it he's going to kill workstations.
Xserve: dead
OS X server: practically dead
Pro products: dead
Apple is turning into the iPad company and those things aren't even innovative compared to android devices. When apple pushes ahead on hardware, samsung (their part supplier) just ships a new model the following month. The software on an ipad is nice, but not much better than android in many ways.
Don't even get me started on the build quality problems with new macs.
I don't think less people are using Perl. I think young people aren't using perl. The hot thing is Python and JavaScript solutions for everything. Python can be used for GUIs, crazy admin scripts, etc. It can be used in place of Perl, but it will never replace Perl. Python doesn't have CPAN. Python code is just as bad as Perl code sometimes, because people who use both languages are sometimes too clever for their own good. Personally, Perl makes more sense to me than Python. I get why people like Python, but it's not for me. After trying to port it to MidnightBSD, I had to look inside and I was not impressed. Then there's the whole Python 3 thing... too many people still use Python 2.x. Python 3 is what will happen if Perl ever actually goes to 6.0 (mainstream). You'll have a fork and then death of the language long term. It's only a matter of time. I think the Python community either has to go back to 2.x or kill security updates on it so it forces people to adopt 3.x.
No one has ever shown me a feature in Python I can't live without. I would never write a GUI in Perl, but I also think it's ridiculous in python aside from prototyping. If you want evidence of why I feel that way, look at many Gnome projects. I have done it once as a script to create PDFs of web pages with their actual rendering from WebKit bindings for my previous employer and I got a bad taste in my mouth.