I think I can help out here a little bit, with the Mach side of things. First, we should realize that this is a hybrid kernel (XNU being Mach/BSD): we shouldn't just assume every single system task falls under Mach's and not BSD's domain. As it happens, IPC is in the domain of Mach in XNU, so this point is moot in this particular thread, but I thought I should point it out in case others make assumptions. Here's what Mach does in XNU, for the record: preemptive multitasking, kernel threads (pthreads map to kernel threads), memory protection, VM management, IPC, interrupt management, real-time support, kernel debugging, and console I/O.
It was originally thought that Mach's poor performance was the result of the message-passing paradigm on which it is based, which seems a reasonable enough conclusion. This in fact causes a performance hit, but it actually turns out that it is not responsible for the majority of the hit. Most of the degradation in Mach was due to other overhead, such as checks for memory access rights. This costly functionality was needed in order to meet the design goal of transparency across distributed systems without compromising security.
For a fork() to occur, a port access right must first be checked. Then there is mapping between user- and kernel-threads. Those are the significant Mach bottlenecks. Linux has a much faster model for threading and scheduling (that 2.6+ scheduler is great!).
It is not the same thing. Water is less dense and takes up more volume when it is frozen than when it is liquid. Think about it: if the same number of particles takes up more space after a state change, this is logically what must occur. Upon freezing, the particles form rigid bonds that force them away from one another, which is why a can of pop might explode if you leave it in the freeer: there is more volume. If there is more volume with the same number of particles, then by definition there is less density. Ice cubes float in water because they are less dense than liquid water. This is unlike most (any?) other substances, which compress and become more dense when frozen .
Geeks need to love "different" things, made for "special" people or not. Geeks need iPods and Unix computers, because other players and Windows computers are not for special people like you guys.
Parent modded insightful?? The iPod is the market share leader in portable digital music players by a hefty margin. How does the most popular of a type of device qualify as "different?" Unix is a much more elegant operating system than anything MS has put out to date. Geeks typically have training that makes us appreciate this elegance. Your ridiculous blanket statement might apply to pseudogeeks, but a real geek prefers Unix because it is technically superior to Windows.
Similarly, AMD is the x86 performance leader in almost every aspect. That's why geeks prefer them: because we keep up with such things. The fact that they aren't Intel chips is just icing. Sure, there is a reaction to unethical or bullyish tactics by these corporations, but ultimately, price/performance is the bottom line. I could be wrong, but that's how this geek and his geek friends feel about it.
You committed several straw man fallacies, I suggest you read the gp closer, unless those straw men were more of your intellectual dishonesty
a) You misled, admitted it, and excused it by saying it was the way America works. Misleading people is unethical, no matter how widespread the practice is. Morality is not determined by what the masses do. Honesty is a very simple and widely accepted moral tenet, even if many ignore it. Most people know they are doing something wrong when they mislead.
b) I didn't call you any names or add you to any group, you heralded your own membership when you equated disingenuous to Americanism. I also didn't say it was your fault that we have a lot of dishonesty in our culture, but it was certainly at least partially your fault it found its way into the thread.
c) It's not that I don't like people who accept dishonesty as a fact of life (we all should accept this fact), I dislike people who engage in dishonesty inveterately, and believe they should always be held to account, instead of simply regarded as participants in the American Pastime of deceit.
And taking part of a statement and twisting it's (sic) intentions around is part of how American works, check the media as well as the politicians lately? And we'll not talk about the media reporting on politicians.
That's not the way America works, that's the way the lowest lifeforms in America work, that is, the ethically-challenged, such as advertising and marketing execs, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, and apparently yourself. Thank you for bringing disingenuousness and ignorance into the forum, and for making us all feel at home.
"Unixen" (Anglo-Saxon), "Unices" (Latin), and "Unixes" (English) are are used as plural for "Unix" (Arbitrary, made-up jargon). I personally prefer "Unices."
Bruce MacLennan's superb book on programming languages has an interesting section that is attributed to someone else, but I cannot recall the source. It essentially goes thusly:
Engineering in any form is at least in part a craft. A lot of the best engineering is aesthetically pleasing: function can follow form. There is, in any endeavor that can approach art (which certainly has to include physical and all other forms of engineering), an unquantifiable element that enters the picture from time to time, often on the most stymying problems.
He mentions this in discussing the quality of language design, which can of course be applied to software design. There are scientific metrics for performance and even usability, but the most elegant solution might be... the most elegant solution.
I think that software engineers who understand this and who aren't depending solely on algorithm analysis and statistics are probably the ones who transcend the mundane. Then, of course, there are those "engineers" who think a big O is a doughnut:P
ARE FORBIDDEN! KEEP YOUR BLACK MAGICK AWAY FROM OUR SCHOOLS, CHURCHES, AND MASONIC LODGES.
This is just the logical outcome of an anti-intellectual culture. Funding for science is drying up, unless it serves some military function. Science (and art) that is incongruous with the extreme religious right's primitive, hypocritical, and heretical brand of superstition is unassailable in terms of reasoning, so these people are, instead of challenging the unchallengeable, simply eliminating thought. This is nothing new, but God almighty it's infuriating. Have we made no real progress since the Dark Ages? Well, apparently we can at least fuck up the ecosystem more effectively:P
Better off getting a degree in something useful and just knowing IT and CS. That's what I did, and I do development for a living (while it lasts); and I have a real degree to fall back on when my job gets outsourced.
A CS degree isn't useful, or 'real?'
Give me a huge break. You do what you love, and if you're good enough at it, you will find a way to make a living at it. Do music, English, or art majors chew their fingernails over their chosen vocation, even though the likelihood of a lucrative career is much slimmer even than the computer scientist's? No. All this panic is nonsense.
After upgrading, Cocoa apps have individual characters popping up in shadowed yellow boxes, as if I have moused over a button and a description popped up. It's very strange and very annoying.
Well, apart from a dialogue explicitly telling him it's an exceedingly bad idea and he should please reconsider and do anything but not that. I don't know about you, but I prefer that I'm given the warning and a way to share my partition devoted to music in spite of it.
Not good enough. Users should be disallowed entirely from doing that unless they go through some trouble that proves they know what they are doing. An idiot user will ignore those warnings. Besides, you can still share the root folder in OS X by at least three methods: attaching it as an AppleTalk share via a privileged account, making changes to your mount point in NetInfo, or hacking samba.conf if you use Samba. Authorized users (meaning not Guests but not Admins) can access Home folders. Of course, the intelligent solution is to simply share your music through iTunes, in your particular example--for OS X OR Windows.
Haha. Well, okay, maybe you're comparing to Windows XP Home, which has its file permission system kind of crippled.
Anyway, XP Pro supports almost arbitrarily complex file permissions.
OS X Server (the closest analogy to XP Professional) supports ACLs. Haha.
I use OS X, Linux, and Windows. I prefer OS X to all of the above for practical reasons, but for ideological reasons I like GNU/Linux the most. Windows offers no ideological or practical advantage from my perspective and for what I do. That said, I wouldn't waste my time on this article, and I don't think it's worth of a/. post.
Which is maintained by apple, not by sun, and is therefore usually a version or two out of date. For god's sake, they JUST NOW came out with Java 5 with the tiger release.
Actually, mclaincausey@eris: mclaincausey$ uname -a
Darwin eris.local 8.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.1.0: Tue May 10 18:16:08 PDT 200
mclaincausey@eris: mclaincausey$ java -version
java version "1.4.2_07"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_07-215)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-50, mixed mode)
mclaincausey@eris: mclaincausey$
They have released Tiger for Tiger if you care to go to the Developer site and install it, however.
OSX: Umm.. well.. it shares your home directory, provided you're not a nonlocal user.. if you are you're hosed.
No, Appletalk allows local users logged in remotely to mount home or any root volume attached to the host system. You're given a list of shares that includes these choices, and you just click on the one you want.
People who are not local to the host who are attaching to shares are forced to access a single folder. Why is this a bad thing? That's called a security feature. If you want to give the world access to your folders, you should have to hack around in Samba, because that would prove that you know what you're doing. In Windows, some idiot can share his volume root to the world without too much trouble.
Also, OS X has more granular access control and it's very easy to set up drop boxes or remote read only folders.
Unless they changed it in Tiger (which they could well have), the BSD file manipulation commands didn't support moving resource forks, so you might want to look into that.
Actually, it's not just an opinion, part of it's quantifiably false. The Finder on the 128k was not at all "responsive," and that could be emprically proven to be false. He has obviously never really used one extensively. File operations, for example were particularly lethargic on those old Macs when compared to their DOS counterparts.
Slashdot Mirror
It was originally thought that Mach's poor performance was the result of the message-passing paradigm on which it is based, which seems a reasonable enough conclusion. This in fact causes a performance hit, but it actually turns out that it is not responsible for the majority of the hit. Most of the degradation in Mach was due to other overhead, such as checks for memory access rights. This costly functionality was needed in order to meet the design goal of transparency across distributed systems without compromising security.
For a fork() to occur, a port access right must first be checked. Then there is mapping between user- and kernel-threads. Those are the significant Mach bottlenecks. Linux has a much faster model for threading and scheduling (that 2.6+ scheduler is great!).
It is not the same thing. Water is less dense and takes up more volume when it is frozen than when it is liquid. Think about it: if the same number of particles takes up more space after a state change, this is logically what must occur. Upon freezing, the particles form rigid bonds that force them away from one another, which is why a can of pop might explode if you leave it in the freeer: there is more volume. If there is more volume with the same number of particles, then by definition there is less density. Ice cubes float in water because they are less dense than liquid water. This is unlike most (any?) other substances, which compress and become more dense when frozen .
Perhaps the SIMD unit affords some sort of advantage for the applucation.
Parent modded insightful?? The iPod is the market share leader in portable digital music players by a hefty margin. How does the most popular of a type of device qualify as "different?" Unix is a much more elegant operating system than anything MS has put out to date. Geeks typically have training that makes us appreciate this elegance. Your ridiculous blanket statement might apply to pseudogeeks, but a real geek prefers Unix because it is technically superior to Windows.
Similarly, AMD is the x86 performance leader in almost every aspect. That's why geeks prefer them: because we keep up with such things. The fact that they aren't Intel chips is just icing. Sure, there is a reaction to unethical or bullyish tactics by these corporations, but ultimately, price/performance is the bottom line. I could be wrong, but that's how this geek and his geek friends feel about it.
a) You misled, admitted it, and excused it by saying it was the way America works. Misleading people is unethical, no matter how widespread the practice is. Morality is not determined by what the masses do. Honesty is a very simple and widely accepted moral tenet, even if many ignore it. Most people know they are doing something wrong when they mislead.
b) I didn't call you any names or add you to any group, you heralded your own membership when you equated disingenuous to Americanism. I also didn't say it was your fault that we have a lot of dishonesty in our culture, but it was certainly at least partially your fault it found its way into the thread.
c) It's not that I don't like people who accept dishonesty as a fact of life (we all should accept this fact), I dislike people who engage in dishonesty inveterately, and believe they should always be held to account, instead of simply regarded as participants in the American Pastime of deceit.
*sheesh!*
"Unixen" (Anglo-Saxon), "Unices" (Latin), and "Unixes" (English) are are used as plural for "Unix" (Arbitrary, made-up jargon). I personally prefer "Unices."
Engineering in any form is at least in part a craft. A lot of the best engineering is aesthetically pleasing: function can follow form. There is, in any endeavor that can approach art (which certainly has to include physical and all other forms of engineering), an unquantifiable element that enters the picture from time to time, often on the most stymying problems.
He mentions this in discussing the quality of language design, which can of course be applied to software design. There are scientific metrics for performance and even usability, but the most elegant solution might be... the most elegant solution.
I think that software engineers who understand this and who aren't depending solely on algorithm analysis and statistics are probably the ones who transcend the mundane. Then, of course, there are those "engineers" who think a big O is a doughnut:P
Looks like a nice mouse, if a bit over-the-top, though.
This is just the logical outcome of an anti-intellectual culture. Funding for science is drying up, unless it serves some military function. Science (and art) that is incongruous with the extreme religious right's primitive, hypocritical, and heretical brand of superstition is unassailable in terms of reasoning, so these people are, instead of challenging the unchallengeable, simply eliminating thought. This is nothing new, but God almighty it's infuriating. Have we made no real progress since the Dark Ages? Well, apparently we can at least fuck up the ecosystem more effectively:P
Signed, Galileo Galilei
SSIA, sorry for the troll but I'm kinda sick of these gaming nerds in my CS program.
Looks like a big flake to me... UFOs on Mars? Not discounting his professionalism or abilities, but... is he like a Scientologist or what?:P
Give me a huge break. You do what you love, and if you're good enough at it, you will find a way to make a living at it. Do music, English, or art majors chew their fingernails over their chosen vocation, even though the likelihood of a lucrative career is much slimmer even than the computer scientist's? No. All this panic is nonsense.
After upgrading, Cocoa apps have individual characters popping up in shadowed yellow boxes, as if I have moused over a button and a description popped up. It's very strange and very annoying.
could the inclement weather have had something to do with the item falling off? Some pretty stiff winds there...
"The sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel."
-WG, Neuromancer
I use OS X, Linux, and Windows. I prefer OS X to all of the above for practical reasons, but for ideological reasons I like GNU/Linux the most. Windows offers no ideological or practical advantage from my perspective and for what I do. That said, I wouldn't waste my time on this article, and I don't think it's worth of a /. post.
Server has ACLs, incidentally.
Actually,
mclaincausey@eris: mclaincausey$ uname -a
Darwin eris.local 8.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.1.0: Tue May 10 18:16:08 PDT 200
mclaincausey@eris: mclaincausey$ java -version
java version "1.4.2_07"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_07-215)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-50, mixed mode)
mclaincausey@eris: mclaincausey$
They have released Tiger for Tiger if you care to go to the Developer site and install it, however.
No, Appletalk allows local users logged in remotely to mount home or any root volume attached to the host system. You're given a list of shares that includes these choices, and you just click on the one you want.
People who are not local to the host who are attaching to shares are forced to access a single folder. Why is this a bad thing? That's called a security feature. If you want to give the world access to your folders, you should have to hack around in Samba, because that would prove that you know what you're doing. In Windows, some idiot can share his volume root to the world without too much trouble.
Also, OS X has more granular access control and it's very easy to set up drop boxes or remote read only folders.
Unless they changed it in Tiger (which they could well have), the BSD file manipulation commands didn't support moving resource forks, so you might want to look into that.
Actually, it's not just an opinion, part of it's quantifiably false. The Finder on the 128k was not at all "responsive," and that could be emprically proven to be false. He has obviously never really used one extensively. File operations, for example were particularly lethargic on those old Macs when compared to their DOS counterparts.
...but the Grand Experiment appears to be dissolving into an un-free state.