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User: xcarroll

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  1. Re:Solution on Color Changes in Mac OS X for the Visually Impaired? · · Score: 1

    I thought Crayola were working a technology called colour-mixing? It's a bit like anti aliasing: you combine some of the 120 colours and suddenly it looks you've got new intermediate shades. There's probably an OpenGL function call for it.

  2. Re:Well what do you expect from a Troll on SecuriTeam Posts Paper on Mac OS X Vulnerabilities · · Score: 1

    You raise an interesting point. In a spectacularly sad fit of pedantry, I tried googling for A/UX and found http://www.applefritter.com/ui/aux , which gives the lowdown from Someone Who Actually Used It (recently!) on the its integration of MacOS 7 and Unix.

    MacOs and X11 ran in separate sessions and the hard disk and RAM were partitioned between the two; you had to session switch between them. The MacOS support relied on a 68000 virtual machine, which I suspect is the kind of trick that is now no longer possible.

    But back to the pedantry: it did not run MacOS apps under X11. You could run X11 under MacOs with MacOs's inflexible memory management; or you could run proper X11 with no MacOs.

    The author offers a few sentences on Aqua (based on NeXT's Display PostScript) vs X11.

    I don't think it's true to say that Classic is 'just an app'. Could Apple have used X11 instead of Display PostScript? Presumably it was possible, if non-trivial, to do. But for machines whose biggest niche is (or is that 'was'?) the graphics/publishing industry, Display PostScript was surely an unsurprising winner over X11.

    And since X11 under Aqua is coming along nicely (now in harware accelerated Beta, due for full intregation by the end of the year?) it seems to me we have the best of all worlds: The most beautiful (excuse my language) OS and full power *nix too.

  3. Well what do you expect from a Troll on SecuriTeam Posts Paper on Mac OS X Vulnerabilities · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not so.

    Let's start with the windowing environment, since that's the first thing most OS 9 users noticed when they first moved to OS X. Except they wouldn't have moved if OS X had started with X Windows because X Windows doesn't run OS 9 apps. Oops, there goes the business...

    Mach-O is not proprietary to Apple. It came via NextStep from Carnagie Mellon's "Mach" project, and is older than Linux. The Mach project and its executable format is published and is generated by gcc. So in what sense exactly is it not 'open'? Oh, you mean, it's not the same as the one you use?

    NetInfo (also inherited from NextStep) does the same thing that NIS+ does on Solaris and yp does on Linux, and for the much the same reasons. Or do you prefer to keep passwords in /etc/passwds where they can be cracked by dictionary attacks?

    So I think we can guess that OS X was not so much an answer to 'how do we lock people into a proprietary format' as 'how do you get a solid, compatible replacement for OS 9 out of the door asap given that we happen to have just bought NextStep'?