I don't see Apple being in a hurry to port FUSE to their kernel. They don't use the FreeBSD kernel, and it's too late in the release cycle of 10.5 to go around adding big new features to their own kernel.
Their NTFS support is just as bad as the Linux kernel's, so it does seem like something that might be useful to add to 10.6.
While an NTFS kernel module with awesome performance would be nice, we haven't even had reliable writing before this (not without the Windows NTFS driver). It wasn't just a lack of performance, it was so bad that you'd need to do stuff like keep an FAT32 partition for transferring files. You won't run your high-traffic website on this, but it is still extremely helpful.
For the purposes of making a dual-boot system less painful, it's great. Now all we need is a Windows driver for Reiser...
I don't personally doubt that the Apollo missions happened more or less as NASA claims. But the presence of a reflector is not the reason I believe it. I believe it for other, more compelling reasons. I pointed out that there are other ways for a reflector to be there because I don't want to see my position supported by such a weak argument.
"It would have had to have some pretty impressive computer controlled landing software for 1969!?!"
Indeed. And it's even more impressive that a Soviet computer did it first, in 1966. What's your point?
The search space for a 1024-bit private key isn't as big as for a symetric key of that size. It's still better than a password though, and there's nothing restricting it to 1024 bits.
Well apparently what they previously published has changed radically, since the code in question seems to have no problems running on earlier processors.
Issues with the chipsets or much more likely their drivers haven't been eliminated, and that's entirely possible because they're new too. These are much more likely as candidates than a CPU being mysteriously slower than it ought to be.
But, that being said... of course what they published previously has changed radically. That's what happens when you throw the old architechture out and introduce a new one. What did you expect? How could they or any other company ever make advancements if they weren't willing to change things? They have an obligation to maintain compatibility with previous x86 chips, but in no way can they be expected to give them identical performance characteristics. Netburst's performance characteristics suck; that's why they're throwing it away.
Does Conroe need everything recompiled just to run efficiently on it now?
No more than for every other implementation of the x86 ISA. Some performance sensitive things like video codecs have different code paths for Athlons, Athlon 64s, Pentium 4s, Pentium Ms, etc. This isn't exactly the first time a new iteration has been released. For most things it doesn't matter, and where it does matter the developers are used to having to perform new optimizations every few years.
The more you optimize software for a particular chip, the more you'll run into problems on different chips. That's how optimizations work.
If some CPU instructions are more equal than other CPU instructions, Intel should have said so a long time ago.
Yeah, I'm outraged!
Oh wait, they did. Not only did they say so a long time ago, they publish documentation and maintain a compiler to help you optimize for the way their processors work.
Privilege escalation attacks are pretty common (on all UNIXes, not just MacOS), it isn't safe to assume malicious code needs you to type your password.
It's true, this is one of the areas where Linux is lacking, but it's not a good time to be buying Apple for this either, since the universal binaries for a lot of that software aren't out yet, and the remaining PowerPC hardware is not priced very competitively and may well run into longer term support issues as 3rd parties and Apple drop support for PowerPC.
The one bright side is that other x86 vendors are so much cheaper for workstations comparable to the PowerMac that a machine purchased now doesn't have to be useful for as long to justify the expense; you're not stuck with it. Also, while it's debatable whether or not they're better quality (I tend to think they do for business class machines, but many disagree), they deffinitely have better support options to get you up and running sooner.
"I wish my experience was like that, and I have been using Linux for YEARS. I'm running Dapper Drake on my PC. And Firefox crashes constantly. One second it's there, the other it's not. Epiphany seems to be more stable, but it's useless as a web-browser. Deskbar crashes constantly. Just about every time I load the desktop I get a message telling me that it has crashed and that do I want to remove it from the desktop entirely"
Linux has all sorts of issues, I make no attempt to deny this. But different, independantly maintained applications randomly crashing so often like sound more like a hardware issue than software bugs.
"I switched back because of the horrid quality of Apple hardware the last few years."
Indeed. I have a G3 iBook that died 3 months out of warranty, but this is not surprising given all the problems I had while it was still in warranty. I haven't had any problems with Ubuntu, but even if I had, the combined downtime from all the hardware problems with my iBook was over 2 months. The hoops I had to jump through as a result of that outweigh the issues I've had with hard distros like Slackware, let alone Ubuntu.
Even though OS X has its merits, it's pretty clear the hardware quality hasn't picked up much. Other vendors offer better quality, particularly in the business class machines, but even if that turned out not to be the case the superior support services from other vendors would still tip the scales by providing faster repairs.
I also find Apple's lineup lacking. For example, I've been shopping around for a new workstation. For less than the base PowerMac, I can get gigs of ECC memory, RAID, and better support services from another vendor. Even if I had a strong preference for OS X, I doubt I'd be willing to spend a couple grand to keep up like that.
There have also been issues with OS X itself. Some of these are specific to my line of work, like the consistent delay in getting updated Java versions. Others aren't, like poor quality control in software updates. Ubuntu's updates are well tested, but Apple has been known to cause major problems by forgetting to include important files, and you don't see forums filled with people reporting their experiences with a particular update because problems are rare.
Using a Mac for a few years has been enough to convince me that there's very little on the platform that I find beneficial. All in all, I consider myself thoroughly de-switched.
"I have to agree. I am a recent Apple convert *FROM* linux (and I helped found Gentoo, so I think I have a little street cred here). I think the *failure* of open source is the failure to adopt unit/integration/etc testing, in otherwise, quality."
Frankly, I think this is more Gentoo's problem than open source in general. I used to use Gentoo and had no end of problems, but my time with Ubuntu and Debian before that has been without incident.
OTOH, Apple hasn't exactly been free from issues, like 2005-007, the security update that broke every 64-bit application because they forgot a file.
"This is, however, a burst transfer rate. It is not sustained. So even a modern SATA -- yes, even the expensive 10,000 RPM one -- won't saturate the bandwidth of FireWire 400"
hmm...
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=zero bs=1M count=10K 10240+0 records in 10240+0 records out 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 161.013 seconds, 66.7 MB/s
"Modern? This is from an old computer to a new computer - and those speeds would be for consecutive data. Which I suppose is fair, given that the user defragmented completely. But an IDE drive's speed is far less 400mbit/s."
They're just about as fast as SATA drives, since ATA-100 is still faster than the sustained speeds of the drives (100 is megabytes in this case). This is why ATA-133 never caught on -- it's faster than any of the drives you'd connect it to. It wasn't SATA's speed that made it popular, it's the numerous other advantages (thinner cable, cheaper, hotplug, etc).
"Your drive doesn't keep up with Firewire. Sorry, but it's true. Disks aren't as fast as you think -- particularly that cheap ATA thing you are using."
Firewire 400 is 400 mbit/s. A modern 7200 rpm SATA desktop drive can sustain just shy of 70 mbyte/s, which is 560 mbit/s.
The point is not a resource usage point, but a flexability point. If you want to add a new driver or even change one, it pretty much takes co-opting the entire kernel tree, or compiling the driver live against the current kernel, or having pre-compiled modules against every possible kernel out there.
Compiling a driver against the current kernel is not prohibitively difficult (eg, VMWare does this for kernels they don't support out of the box).
The driver API wouldn't need to be as stable in a Microkernel design. (I'm not a kernel guru, so you may know better)
This is solely a matter of policy. Linus doesn't want a stable API, so they don't have one. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's not a microkernel. A stable API is equally possible with a monolithic kernel or a microkernel, and drivers that work across different versions are equally impossible without a stable API.
Slashdot Mirror
I've found Opera's caching to be way too agressive.
"This one is worth pursuing."
I agree 100%. I'm just pointing out that Apple doesn't see it that way.
True, but traditionally they don't put much enthusiasm into backporting features.
I don't see Apple being in a hurry to port FUSE to their kernel. They don't use the FreeBSD kernel, and it's too late in the release cycle of 10.5 to go around adding big new features to their own kernel.
Their NTFS support is just as bad as the Linux kernel's, so it does seem like something that might be useful to add to 10.6.
While an NTFS kernel module with awesome performance would be nice, we haven't even had reliable writing before this (not without the Windows NTFS driver). It wasn't just a lack of performance, it was so bad that you'd need to do stuff like keep an FAT32 partition for transferring files. You won't run your high-traffic website on this, but it is still extremely helpful.
For the purposes of making a dual-boot system less painful, it's great. Now all we need is a Windows driver for Reiser...
I don't personally doubt that the Apollo missions happened more or less as NASA claims. But the presence of a reflector is not the reason I believe it. I believe it for other, more compelling reasons. I pointed out that there are other ways for a reflector to be there because I don't want to see my position supported by such a weak argument.
"It would have had to have some pretty impressive computer controlled landing software for 1969!?!"
Indeed. And it's even more impressive that a Soviet computer did it first, in 1966. What's your point?
A robot probe could easily have carried a reflector. People wouldn't be required.
The search space for a 1024-bit private key isn't as big as for a symetric key of that size. It's still better than a password though, and there's nothing restricting it to 1024 bits.
Am I the only one that simply got used to memorizing random passwords?
"I'll get optimistic when they break the 0*C barrier."
I don't think a mammal freezes at 0 due to the salt and other impurities.
Issues with the chipsets or much more likely their drivers haven't been eliminated, and that's entirely possible because they're new too. These are much more likely as candidates than a CPU being mysteriously slower than it ought to be.
But, that being said... of course what they published previously has changed radically. That's what happens when you throw the old architechture out and introduce a new one. What did you expect? How could they or any other company ever make advancements if they weren't willing to change things? They have an obligation to maintain compatibility with previous x86 chips, but in no way can they be expected to give them identical performance characteristics. Netburst's performance characteristics suck; that's why they're throwing it away.
No more than for every other implementation of the x86 ISA. Some performance sensitive things like video codecs have different code paths for Athlons, Athlon 64s, Pentium 4s, Pentium Ms, etc. This isn't exactly the first time a new iteration has been released. For most things it doesn't matter, and where it does matter the developers are used to having to perform new optimizations every few years.
The more you optimize software for a particular chip, the more you'll run into problems on different chips. That's how optimizations work.
Oh wait, they did. Not only did they say so a long time ago, they publish documentation and maintain a compiler to help you optimize for the way their processors work.
Indeed. A driver issue could easily be causing these problems, particularly if it's a new chipset and so forth as well.
Privilege escalation attacks are pretty common (on all UNIXes, not just MacOS), it isn't safe to assume malicious code needs you to type your password.
It's true, this is one of the areas where Linux is lacking, but it's not a good time to be buying Apple for this either, since the universal binaries for a lot of that software aren't out yet, and the remaining PowerPC hardware is not priced very competitively and may well run into longer term support issues as 3rd parties and Apple drop support for PowerPC.
The one bright side is that other x86 vendors are so much cheaper for workstations comparable to the PowerMac that a machine purchased now doesn't have to be useful for as long to justify the expense; you're not stuck with it. Also, while it's debatable whether or not they're better quality (I tend to think they do for business class machines, but many disagree), they deffinitely have better support options to get you up and running sooner.
"I wish my experience was like that, and I have been using Linux for YEARS. I'm running Dapper Drake on my PC. And Firefox crashes constantly. One second it's there, the other it's not. Epiphany seems to be more stable, but it's useless as a web-browser. Deskbar crashes constantly. Just about every time I load the desktop I get a message telling me that it has crashed and that do I want to remove it from the desktop entirely"
Linux has all sorts of issues, I make no attempt to deny this. But different, independantly maintained applications randomly crashing so often like sound more like a hardware issue than software bugs.
"I switched back because of the horrid quality of Apple hardware the last few years."
Indeed. I have a G3 iBook that died 3 months out of warranty, but this is not surprising given all the problems I had while it was still in warranty. I haven't had any problems with Ubuntu, but even if I had, the combined downtime from all the hardware problems with my iBook was over 2 months. The hoops I had to jump through as a result of that outweigh the issues I've had with hard distros like Slackware, let alone Ubuntu.
Even though OS X has its merits, it's pretty clear the hardware quality hasn't picked up much. Other vendors offer better quality, particularly in the business class machines, but even if that turned out not to be the case the superior support services from other vendors would still tip the scales by providing faster repairs.
I also find Apple's lineup lacking. For example, I've been shopping around for a new workstation. For less than the base PowerMac, I can get gigs of ECC memory, RAID, and better support services from another vendor. Even if I had a strong preference for OS X, I doubt I'd be willing to spend a couple grand to keep up like that.
There have also been issues with OS X itself. Some of these are specific to my line of work, like the consistent delay in getting updated Java versions. Others aren't, like poor quality control in software updates. Ubuntu's updates are well tested, but Apple has been known to cause major problems by forgetting to include important files, and you don't see forums filled with people reporting their experiences with a particular update because problems are rare.
Using a Mac for a few years has been enough to convince me that there's very little on the platform that I find beneficial. All in all, I consider myself thoroughly de-switched.
"I have to agree. I am a recent Apple convert *FROM* linux (and I helped found Gentoo, so I think I have a little street cred here). I think the *failure* of open source is the failure to adopt unit/integration/etc testing, in otherwise, quality."
Frankly, I think this is more Gentoo's problem than open source in general. I used to use Gentoo and had no end of problems, but my time with Ubuntu and Debian before that has been without incident.
OTOH, Apple hasn't exactly been free from issues, like 2005-007, the security update that broke every 64-bit application because they forgot a file.
"This is, however, a burst transfer rate. It is not sustained. So even a modern SATA -- yes, even the expensive 10,000 RPM one -- won't saturate the bandwidth of FireWire 400"
hmm...
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=zero bs=1M count=10K
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 161.013 seconds, 66.7 MB/s
Looks pretty sustained to me.
Well, for the purposes of figuring out whether or not Firewire is a bottleneck, it's enough.
"The somewhat recent changes to Apple's hardware quality are surprising considering the past obsessiveness with getting the design right."
Tell that to my G3 iBook and its 6 logic boards.
"Modern? This is from an old computer to a new computer - and those speeds would be for consecutive data. Which I suppose is fair, given that the user defragmented completely. But an IDE drive's speed is far less 400mbit/s."
They're just about as fast as SATA drives, since ATA-100 is still faster than the sustained speeds of the drives (100 is megabytes in this case). This is why ATA-133 never caught on -- it's faster than any of the drives you'd connect it to. It wasn't SATA's speed that made it popular, it's the numerous other advantages (thinner cable, cheaper, hotplug, etc).
"Your drive doesn't keep up with Firewire. Sorry, but it's true. Disks aren't as fast as you think -- particularly that cheap ATA thing you are using."
Firewire 400 is 400 mbit/s. A modern 7200 rpm SATA desktop drive can sustain just shy of 70 mbyte/s, which is 560 mbit/s.
Firewire 400 is 400 megabits per second.
A modern SATA drive can do just shy of 70 megabytes per second, which is 560 megabits.
This is solely a matter of policy. Linus doesn't want a stable API, so they don't have one. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's not a microkernel. A stable API is equally possible with a monolithic kernel or a microkernel, and drivers that work across different versions are equally impossible without a stable API.