It's being done already. IBM released PPC board designs to the market, license free and there are third party people making PPC based computers as we speak. They should run Darwin, they may run OSX and they definetly run LinuxPPC. The days of hardware roms blocking cloning are pretty much over.
CompUSA carries macs today, Sears does as well, Circuit City probably will start RSN. I doubt that they are going to stop selling these machines because they are preloaded with OS X.
Microsoft exports COM to macs via Office and IE (take a look at your system folder if you have a mac with these products) while Apple exports SOM to windows boxen via Quicktime. It's two sides of the same coin and each is trying to make it easier to develop using their API model.
If I can't see what it is filtering, it *is* a bad implementation. No CPHack necessary for that intellectual discovery, just high standards and an unwillingness to be led around by the nose.
There are very few people who will say things outright on a lot of subjects and I won't bore you with examples because you might think I'm lumping you in with and get offended off point.
Any technological aid (like my previously mentioned gate on the stairway) can be used by both responsible or irresponsible parents. The worth of the gate or the worth of filtering is independent of the quality of the parent using it.
Throwing in parent quality and latchkey kids is obfuscation and worse of the real issues of what kind of filtering is ok and how (or whether) we are going to do it.
You may be able to get that $30k Power4 Mac. It just might come with an IBM label though.
There has been a little bit of speculation in the press that IBM is going to migrate out of AIX and into Darwin/OSX because it would make more sense to do that rather than update AIX to take advantage of Altivec. Who knows?
The GUI is neither based on X nor is it particularly proprietary (being an implementation of PDF). Apple, for cost reasons, didn't want to license Adobe's visual postscript so they rewrote the PDF open standard to (my term) visual PDF.
If you load the BSD 4.4 compatibility layer (it's an optional load on the install CD), you should be able to run any BSD apps and possibly Linux apps as well.
*NOBODY* does more to promote gun safety and gun training courses in the US than the NRA, the great bugaboo of gun control advocates in the US. Guns without training are horribly dangerous. Guns with training are dangerous mostly to tyrants, thugs, rapists, and theives.
There are exceptions and there are tragedies. My hat is still off to the swiss and if we are going to keep both safety and liberty, I would follow their example over the English/Japanese model any day.
Steve Jobs has declared that Cocoa is good therefore there is going to be a huge push to get everything written in Cocoa before Classic disappears (probably on Mac OS XI) and Carbon disappears (probably Mac OS XII).
Apple has moved developers and its users like this for many years. Students of OS history should look at the differences introduced in Systems 6, 7, and 8 for practical primers. The 680x0 > PPC transition, ADB > USB and dropping the floppy are demonstrations that hardware gets moved in similar ways.
Frankly, when done right, this is *a good thing* and Apple has been doing it right for the most part. After all, who really wants to deal with IRQs if plug and play works flawlessly? When Apple makes it flawless it wins and retains its fanatical followers.
As for no classic environment for OSX for Intel, I wouldn't count that out either. Certainly Connectix could emulate PPC as easily as they emulate x86, the big question remains, is Steve Jobs is paying them to do so?
Not entirely true that G3's are the only machines supported for Darwin 1.0, the 604e machines like the 8500/9500's will work as well and are included in the list on Apple's site.
Oh why didn't I think of acting like a parent? How silly of me.
The point remains, you can't be there all the time, you can't hold their hand throughout their childhood with no time off, and you can't monitor 100% of their surfing without tools to help you do the job. I'm saying that a filtering tool that is transparent, individualized, and much more finely tuned to age could be an important *HELPER* to parents struggling to handle a culture that is often hostile to family virtues.
That tool has yet to be written and it is certainly not CyberPatrol in its current incarnation. But arguing against a product is one thing, arguing against the product category is entirely different.
Of course I want to be there as much as possible and I want to teach my child the difference between right and wrong and why visiting some of these sites is a *bad* idea. But to go from there to the idea that this is my only option and that I can't have any tools to help me technologically is just hiding your agenda behind the 'freedom' flag.
As for the crack about latchkey kids, my parents came to this country with 2 kids and 2 suitcases in order to get out of communism and have a better life for us. They both worked so that we weren't stuck in the S. Bronx and caught up in the gangs as recruits or target practice. Did I miss them while they worked long hours? You bet. But I think it is insulting to them and the millions of others in exactly the same boat to belittle their sacrifices in the way you did. Shame on you.
If we had *more* guns, we would probably end up with far fewer crimes (See Prof. Lott for the many studies proving this). For a practical example, take a look at Switzerland. Everybody from 18-56 has both a *true* military assault weapon in his house and ammunition for same. The violence rate is much lower than in both the US and the UK.
I've been advocating the same for several threads. If the list spec were opened so that each parent could pick your own and every religious or cultural organization that cared to could submit their own lists and individuals picked what ran then most of the problems would go away.
If I can get startup money for a venture I'm gearing up, I might just do it myself.
Actually, the Republicans have several legislators up in arms over civil forfeiture reform and are spearheading efforts to repeal some of the more egregious practices going on right now
Saying that I have to be tied to my kid for 18 years in person is as silly as saying that I shouldn't buy a gate for my stairs. After all I should be close enough to personally stop him from falling down the stairs.
Real life doesn't work like this and if you insist that parents should work like that be prepared to be ignored. We need tools to assist in child rearing. Granted, CyberPatrol is stupid and needs to be completely reworked before I would consider it as a filter but the concept of filters is not in and of itself a bad one. Or do all of you keep slashdot set on -1?
Why not just make an open framework for Tipper Gore, the Catholic Church, the Baptists, and anybody else who cares to submit lists of inappropriate sites that should not be seen. Then parents can say, I trust x to manage this job and apply that set of filters on their little tyke's surfing, or even their own if they choose.
Having a bunch of geeks decide what is morally appropriate is just stupid.
Just ask them if they like the idea of living in a company town, with a company car and a company house. That's where we'll end up w/ the current trend of products like the DVD encryption.
I personally don't have a problem w/censorware per se but I do have a problem with somebody picking a list that I can't check and can't edit. There's a great IPO opportunity for somebody who would make a child filter that can truly be controlled by parents.
The idea has been that the third world is also "underdeveloped" or "developing", i.e. not satisfied with where they are as you paint these idyllic scenes of Nepal. You raise an interesting point because that's where we are all likely to end up at some point, barring theft by thugs (government or otherwise), with enough material resources for our own desires and enough padding for natural disasters. You might want to look up ESR's "The Magic Cauldron" and envision what a society like that would be where it isn't just the technical subgroup that participates in a gift culture.
But I would argue that the angry third world that is looking to get in on the action (and the section that you agree with me on) is what is generally meant by the "third world". Maybe there is a need for a new term...
Why are all these "lazy and apathetic" third worlders trying to get into the first world and working incredibly hard in brutal low paid jobs here? How did that plane ticket make them energetic? Answer, it didn't.
When you have a third world society that has centuries of history where whoever advanced got his advances stolen from him, you are going to have this learned helplessness. It isn't illogical to reject a false hope that is only going to get you shot, robbed, or otherwise punished by the local thug.
Information freedom is one tool to combat government thievery that exists throughout the third world. But it isn't enough and in general the everyday people who suffer under the system don't have the reserves necessary to resist the local thugs to *keep* what their progress earns them. When the internet can do that for them (say 5-10 years down the road) then the third world will become instantly energetic and productive. Think electronic fund keeping for micropayments. It's what's needed but we're not quite there yet.
You seem to be saying that training wheels (gui tools) should come after, not before true mastery (CLI mastery). A lot of IT people don't know how to go behind the GUI, it's true. They are also paid accordingly (a lot less). I don't want a world where everybody is an IT wizard that can solve all problems. After all, how are you going to persuade these uber IT people to manage changing tapes as an exclusive job? Getting out of the drudge work is a neverending incentive to learn more.
Actually, there are border checks on the Internet. Take a look at the PRC and its efforts at countrywide censorship. Just like physical world border posts/checks, their system isn't 100% reliable but the people that they catch/make an example of are quite effective so far. It's a completely open question of whether this model is going to work over the medium term (3-5 years) but right now, it's doing its job, keeping the communist party in power in the PRC. B-(
Well, it's a little unclear right now if PPC only hardware support is going to be true. Apple has committed to basing OS X on Darwin which does run on Intel based PC's. So it's likely that you will be able to run OS X on Intel hardware as a technical feat but it is very unclear whether or not Apple is going to support it as a product or OS X on x86 will remain a vendor unsupported hack with 3rd party support.
But beyond the supported hardware, having 5% of the worldwide market for personal computers shifting over to UNIX is a very big deal no matter how they get there. When Macs gain the stability of Unix while keeping the OS suitable for Ad execs, grandmothers, and other non-technical people, the entire mainstream perception of what minimum OS functionality is required to remain commercially viable will change radically. This is very bad news for Microsoft. If Linux doesn't get easier to use, it may also be bad news for Linux
I think that you completely misunderstand what it means to be an administrator.
An administrator's job is never done. There's the 'sheet metal work' of physically maintaining plant, there's keeping up with the hundreds of new security threats from malicious code to securing physical plant, there's account management and if you get very, very good at all of the above you get to do your real job of finding out what your users want and modifying your systems to achieve it better/faster with a positive effect on the organization's bottom line.
The last job is the most important and the least done because idiot programmers (most of whom cannot even spell buffoon) steal away our time, forcing us to deal with cryptic user interfaces to do the monkey work. If it's a simple and standard task I don't want to have to devote a lot of brain power to it and a GUI helps there. If I'm doing something complex or unique I want the freedom to go behind the GUI to a CLI (which is where Apple, until Mac OS X, fell down on the job).
I want to have the time to rally the users and get buy in for an enterprise directory. I want to set up a deployment of X.509 certificates and maybe even Kerberos security. I want to be able to do these things and many more and I need every scrap of time I can wring out from the day to day routine. A well designed UI helps. User hostile UI is just offensive.
Some of us have relatives in other states, some in other countries. It's nice to have a secure way to easily get at your parents computer and fix most problems without having to buy PC anywhere (and how do you get it installed without a trip out there in the first place) or a similar program.
There *is* going to be an easy to use Unix out there, fit for mothers and non-tech users everywhere. I just don't know whether it'll be Linux or Mac OS X.
It seems the the user hostile contingent of Linux advocates is alive and well. It is the attitude of "I don't want standards" that is going to handicap Linux for the forseeable future and give other development models a competitive opening.
There *is* going to be a user friendly unix implementation. It's called Mac OS X. And nobody in the non-tech world is going to care about the comparative kernel merits of BSD v. Linux (I'm a network administrator and frankly I don't care that much either). Darwin's openness will ensure that technical people can scratch those pesky software itches while the extra control that Apple gets by mandating Aqua will allow all those secretaries and grandmothers to get a secure, stable, easy to use and maintain OS.
Listen... those footsteps you hear behind you are Apple sneaking up on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
It's being done already. IBM released PPC board designs to the market, license free and there are third party people making PPC based computers as we speak. They should run Darwin, they may run OSX and they definetly run LinuxPPC. The days of hardware roms blocking cloning are pretty much over.
DB
If IBM offers OSX as a replacement for AIX, there's a clone arrangement that would have absolutely no overlap.
It would also get rid of the "macs are toys" BS that keeps floating up every once in awhile
DB
CompUSA carries macs today, Sears does as well, Circuit City probably will start RSN. I doubt that they are going to stop selling these machines because they are preloaded with OS X.
DB
Microsoft exports COM to macs via Office and IE (take a look at your system folder if you have a mac with these products) while Apple exports SOM to windows boxen via Quicktime. It's two sides of the same coin and each is trying to make it easier to develop using their API model.
DB
If I can't see what it is filtering, it *is* a bad implementation. No CPHack necessary for that intellectual discovery, just high standards and an unwillingness to be led around by the nose.
There are very few people who will say things outright on a lot of subjects and I won't bore you with examples because you might think I'm lumping you in with and get offended off point.
Any technological aid (like my previously mentioned gate on the stairway) can be used by both responsible or irresponsible parents. The worth of the gate or the worth of filtering is independent of the quality of the parent using it.
Throwing in parent quality and latchkey kids is obfuscation and worse of the real issues of what kind of filtering is ok and how (or whether) we are going to do it.
DB
You may be able to get that $30k Power4 Mac. It just might come with an IBM label though.
There has been a little bit of speculation in the press that IBM is going to migrate out of AIX and into Darwin/OSX because it would make more sense to do that rather than update AIX to take advantage of Altivec. Who knows?
DB
The GUI is neither based on X nor is it particularly proprietary (being an implementation of PDF). Apple, for cost reasons, didn't want to license Adobe's visual postscript so they rewrote the PDF open standard to (my term) visual PDF.
If you load the BSD 4.4 compatibility layer (it's an optional load on the install CD), you should be able to run any BSD apps and possibly Linux apps as well.
DB
*NOBODY* does more to promote gun safety and gun training courses in the US than the NRA, the great bugaboo of gun control advocates in the US. Guns without training are horribly dangerous. Guns with training are dangerous mostly to tyrants, thugs, rapists, and theives.
There are exceptions and there are tragedies. My hat is still off to the swiss and if we are going to keep both safety and liberty, I would follow their example over the English/Japanese model any day.
DB
Steve Jobs has declared that Cocoa is good therefore there is going to be a huge push to get everything written in Cocoa before Classic disappears (probably on Mac OS XI) and Carbon disappears (probably Mac OS XII).
Apple has moved developers and its users like this for many years. Students of OS history should look at the differences introduced in Systems 6, 7, and 8 for practical primers. The 680x0 > PPC transition, ADB > USB and dropping the floppy are demonstrations that hardware gets moved in similar ways.
Frankly, when done right, this is *a good thing* and Apple has been doing it right for the most part. After all, who really wants to deal with IRQs if plug and play works flawlessly? When Apple makes it flawless it wins and retains its fanatical followers.
As for no classic environment for OSX for Intel, I wouldn't count that out either. Certainly Connectix could emulate PPC as easily as they emulate x86, the big question remains, is Steve Jobs is paying them to do so?
DB
Not entirely true that G3's are the only machines supported for Darwin 1.0, the 604e machines like the 8500/9500's will work as well and are included in the list on Apple's site.
DB
Oh why didn't I think of acting like a parent? How silly of me.
The point remains, you can't be there all the time, you can't hold their hand throughout their childhood with no time off, and you can't monitor 100% of their surfing without tools to help you do the job. I'm saying that a filtering tool that is transparent, individualized, and much more finely tuned to age could be an important *HELPER* to parents struggling to handle a culture that is often hostile to family virtues.
That tool has yet to be written and it is certainly not CyberPatrol in its current incarnation. But arguing against a product is one thing, arguing against the product category is entirely different.
Of course I want to be there as much as possible and I want to teach my child the difference between right and wrong and why visiting some of these sites is a *bad* idea. But to go from there to the idea that this is my only option and that I can't have any tools to help me technologically is just hiding your agenda behind the 'freedom' flag.
As for the crack about latchkey kids, my parents came to this country with 2 kids and 2 suitcases in order to get out of communism and have a better life for us. They both worked so that we weren't stuck in the S. Bronx and caught up in the gangs as recruits or target practice. Did I miss them while they worked long hours? You bet. But I think it is insulting to them and the millions of others in exactly the same boat to belittle their sacrifices in the way you did. Shame on you.
DB
If we had *more* guns, we would probably end up with far fewer crimes (See Prof. Lott for the many studies proving this). For a practical example, take a look at Switzerland. Everybody from 18-56 has both a *true* military assault weapon in his house and ammunition for same. The violence rate is much lower than in both the US and the UK.
It's not the guns, it's the society.
DB
I've been advocating the same for several threads. If the list spec were opened so that each parent could pick your own and every religious or cultural organization that cared to could submit their own lists and individuals picked what ran then most of the problems would go away.
If I can get startup money for a venture I'm gearing up, I might just do it myself.
DB
Actually, the Republicans have several legislators up in arms over civil forfeiture reform and are spearheading efforts to repeal some of the more egregious practices going on right now
DB
Saying that I have to be tied to my kid for 18 years in person is as silly as saying that I shouldn't buy a gate for my stairs. After all I should be close enough to personally stop him from falling down the stairs.
Real life doesn't work like this and if you insist that parents should work like that be prepared to be ignored. We need tools to assist in child rearing. Granted, CyberPatrol is stupid and needs to be completely reworked before I would consider it as a filter but the concept of filters is not in and of itself a bad one. Or do all of you keep slashdot set on -1?
DB
Why not just make an open framework for Tipper Gore, the Catholic Church, the Baptists, and anybody else who cares to submit lists of inappropriate sites that should not be seen. Then parents can say, I trust x to manage this job and apply that set of filters on their little tyke's surfing, or even their own if they choose.
Having a bunch of geeks decide what is morally appropriate is just stupid.
DB
Just ask them if they like the idea of living in a company town, with a company car and a company house. That's where we'll end up w/ the current trend of products like the DVD encryption.
I personally don't have a problem w/censorware per se but I do have a problem with somebody picking a list that I can't check and can't edit. There's a great IPO opportunity for somebody who would make a child filter that can truly be controlled by parents.
DB
The idea has been that the third world is also "underdeveloped" or "developing", i.e. not satisfied with where they are as you paint these idyllic scenes of Nepal. You raise an interesting point because that's where we are all likely to end up at some point, barring theft by thugs (government or otherwise), with enough material resources for our own desires and enough padding for natural disasters. You might want to look up ESR's "The Magic Cauldron" and envision what a society like that would be where it isn't just the technical subgroup that participates in a gift culture.
But I would argue that the angry third world that is looking to get in on the action (and the section that you agree with me on) is what is generally meant by the "third world". Maybe there is a need for a new term...
DB
Why are all these "lazy and apathetic" third worlders trying to get into the first world and working incredibly hard in brutal low paid jobs here? How did that plane ticket make them energetic? Answer, it didn't.
When you have a third world society that has centuries of history where whoever advanced got his advances stolen from him, you are going to have this learned helplessness. It isn't illogical to reject a false hope that is only going to get you shot, robbed, or otherwise punished by the local thug.
Information freedom is one tool to combat government thievery that exists throughout the third world. But it isn't enough and in general the everyday people who suffer under the system don't have the reserves necessary to resist the local thugs to *keep* what their progress earns them. When the internet can do that for them (say 5-10 years down the road) then the third world will become instantly energetic and productive. Think electronic fund keeping for micropayments. It's what's needed but we're not quite there yet.
DB
You seem to be saying that training wheels (gui tools) should come after, not before true mastery (CLI mastery). A lot of IT people don't know how to go behind the GUI, it's true. They are also paid accordingly (a lot less). I don't want a world where everybody is an IT wizard that can solve all problems. After all, how are you going to persuade these uber IT people to manage changing tapes as an exclusive job? Getting out of the drudge work is a neverending incentive to learn more.
DB
Actually, there are border checks on the Internet. Take a look at the PRC and its efforts at countrywide censorship. Just like physical world border posts/checks, their system isn't 100% reliable but the people that they catch/make an example of are quite effective so far. It's a completely open question of whether this model is going to work over the medium term (3-5 years) but right now, it's doing its job, keeping the communist party in power in the PRC. B-(
DB
But beyond the supported hardware, having 5% of the worldwide market for personal computers shifting over to UNIX is a very big deal no matter how they get there. When Macs gain the stability of Unix while keeping the OS suitable for Ad execs, grandmothers, and other non-technical people, the entire mainstream perception of what minimum OS functionality is required to remain commercially viable will change radically. This is very bad news for Microsoft. If Linux doesn't get easier to use, it may also be bad news for Linux
DB
I think that you completely misunderstand what it means to be an administrator.
An administrator's job is never done. There's the 'sheet metal work' of physically maintaining plant, there's keeping up with the hundreds of new security threats from malicious code to securing physical plant, there's account management and if you get very, very good at all of the above you get to do your real job of finding out what your users want and modifying your systems to achieve it better/faster with a positive effect on the organization's bottom line.
The last job is the most important and the least done because idiot programmers (most of whom cannot even spell buffoon) steal away our time, forcing us to deal with cryptic user interfaces to do the monkey work. If it's a simple and standard task I don't want to have to devote a lot of brain power to it and a GUI helps there. If I'm doing something complex or unique I want the freedom to go behind the GUI to a CLI (which is where Apple, until Mac OS X, fell down on the job).
I want to have the time to rally the users and get buy in for an enterprise directory. I want to set up a deployment of X.509 certificates and maybe even Kerberos security. I want to be able to do these things and many more and I need every scrap of time I can wring out from the day to day routine. A well designed UI helps. User hostile UI is just offensive.
DB
Some of us have relatives in other states, some in other countries. It's nice to have a secure way to easily get at your parents computer and fix most problems without having to buy PC anywhere (and how do you get it installed without a trip out there in the first place) or a similar program.
There *is* going to be an easy to use Unix out there, fit for mothers and non-tech users everywhere. I just don't know whether it'll be Linux or Mac OS X.
DB
It seems the the user hostile contingent of Linux advocates is alive and well. It is the attitude of "I don't want standards" that is going to handicap Linux for the forseeable future and give other development models a competitive opening.
There *is* going to be a user friendly unix implementation. It's called Mac OS X. And nobody in the non-tech world is going to care about the comparative kernel merits of BSD v. Linux (I'm a network administrator and frankly I don't care that much either). Darwin's openness will ensure that technical people can scratch those pesky software itches while the extra control that Apple gets by mandating Aqua will allow all those secretaries and grandmothers to get a secure, stable, easy to use and maintain OS.
Listen... those footsteps you hear behind you are Apple sneaking up on Linux.
DB