AUII, a competing standard to RJ-45 Ethernet (BaseT). Sun also used them for a while, and at the time Apple decided on it it was the best bet... but since they were early they took the risk of betting on the wrong horse, and that was what happened.
PC's on the other hand were woefully late having Ethernet standard (on the motherboard). They are also now woefully late to have FireWire.
Ironically, Apple was late to having WiFi included in every Laptop. They were the first to have it in a laptop, the first to have the Antennas built into to every laptop, but they kept the actual card as a option for too long.
You are still not getting the point: if something corrupts/erases data from the RAID mirrors both copies are corrupted/erased. RAID is not about backup, it is about redundant hardware.
Umm... I think you got the point reversed. The poster was talking about the fact that you can take BSD licensed code, make changes to it to support your product, and not be forced to give your work to anyone else (for example your competition).
While we all understand the idea behind the GPL, many businesses will simply not even consider using OS's based on it because of the forced nature of it. FreeBSD stands to get a lot of users because of this in the embedded space.
Now, the gamble with the BSD license is that people might use the code without ever contributing back. But the bet is that the big companies will give some sort of kickback to the projects, even if it is not the complete solution.
An example of this is practice would be Apple and KHTML. While Apple has not completely given everything it could have given, the KHTML project has benefited from Apple using a derivative of KHTML. We can argue about whether it is enough, but it is benefit that Apple would not have contributed if KHTML were GPL rather than BSD. Management would not have touched it with a 10 foot pole.
To refer to the combination of North and South America (and Central America if you are so inclined to divide it that way) as a single continent is rather silly. It does not really make any sense from a geological perspective (then again neither does the Europe and Asia divide), a watershed one, a geopolitical one (unless you are talking about the Monroe Doctrine and that style of thinking), or a environmental/biological perspective.
The term "Americas" makes so much more sense. Once you are to that understanding, then it is no so far to shortening the USA to "America".
The problem is not that Firefox does not as gracefully handle incorrect html, it is that it does not handle broken html in exactly the same way as Internet Explorer. Some people don't really know what they are doing and just hack away until it looks like they want it to in their version of their browser (often IE). But if you look at it in another version of the same browser, or another browser altogether it fails in a different manner. The problem is that people then blame the browser for failing, when the real problem is with the page.
Note that this can be as much of a problem between different versions of Internet Explorer as between IE and Firefox
And there is no real way of exactly reproducing the failure modes of another piece of software without duplicating that software exactly... and we all know how illegal that would be (not to mention directly opposed to the point).
The real solution is the one that good web developers use: try to stick to the standards as closely as is possible (within the constraints of the browsers at hand), and always test in as many browsers and platforms as you can. It tends to mitigate the problems that you will encounter when newer browsers come out.
You don't license your hardware, but you do license your software. To put another spin on it, do you think it would be alright to buy copy of the latest Harry Potter book, copy out the text, and start selling your own printed versions? Notice I am not talking about loaning your book to that person, but actually making a copy. You are always free to loan your computer (and the software on it) to a friend.
Phil Shiller said that Apple would not actively be preventing people from running Windows on Apple boxes. And why would they? On the same token, why would they do any work at all to make Windows run on their boxes?
My guess is that without a bit of work Windows will not install on the final boxes, and will always be a hack: a few people will do it, but the majority won't bother. And that would suit Apple just fine.
Re:FreeBSD
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I disagree with much of what you said:
The Ports system is far superior to the rpm system. It actually tracks dependancies, and has a system to grab them for you. You are way off base on that statement.
FreeBSD is a full OS. I have no idea what you mean by your statement.
Yes, compiling from source does take a long time. Have you tried the pre-compiled package system? Same dependancy tracking but with pre-compiled binaries?
FreeBSD has the best documentation of any of the unix-like OS's that I have found. The handbook covers lots of cases.
FreeBSD also has softupdates... very much like Journaling. And that is on by default through the auto command in the installer.
And I think you are missing the point of FreeBSD, it is a server OS... I think most of your complaints come from the fact that there is no GUI by default. This is because you don't usually sit on the console on FreeBSD servers.
1) The Newton was the first PDA, and the first ones were the size of a current Palm/PocketPC. You are thinking of the later Newton 2K series. And for the markets that were actually buying these devices at the time (Doctors and Industry) they were the right product. Those markets were just not big enough.
2) For the computers it was designed for Cooperative Multitasking was the correct choice. Preemptive takes too much processor power for those older computers. Remember, Apple started doing this when there was no such thing as multitasking on the PC. Apple was stuck with the choice for a while, but has now gotten out of it.
3) You are overstating it, and it is not the machines that have been left behind, but the OS.
4) I own a Cube, and still use it daily, and you are just plain wrong about it. I have not had any heat problems, and how often do you change your peripherals.
5) You are mistaking MHz for speed. You can learn why this is a mistake many places. You are also forgetting that the mini (or Macintosh in general) is not being about as cheap as possible. If you compare it against comparable computers you will find that it is very competitive.
6) No, MacOS X is not a certified UNIX OS. The only OS currently available that is (that I am aware of) is SCO UNIX. Linux is not, the BSD's are not, Solaris is not. What is your point?
MacOS X is a OS in the tradition of unix (notice the lower case name), and is mostly POSIX compliant (but not certified as such). That is what really matters.
7) PPC is a great chip, but there is not enough research going into it to keep it competitive. In 2 years, when Apple's transition is complete there will be no PPC chip that is competitive. That is what came out of negotiations between Apple and IBM (after the relationship with Motorola/FreeScale suffered a similar fate).
Oh... and Altivec is significantly better than SSE2 (which is significantly better than SSE, which is significantly better than MMX). No one who has done real research in the field disputes this. But Apple is not going to be using chips with SSE2, they are going to be using SSE2's successor, the one that Intel is promising will be much more Altivec-like.
8) Most desktops are going towards XP, and everything points to Longhorn being even more of that treatment. In comparison Aqua looks very professional. And I think you are just wrong even with the comparison to Win2K.
9) On software longevity you simply don't know what you are talking about. I have programs from system 6 that still run in MacOS X's Classic layer. There we are talking about a contemporary with DOS... and at the end of its life Win3.1. Do you have any Win 3.1 software that still runs?
There are lots of programs that don't work, but most of those touch hardware, and the same rules apply to Windows as they do Mac.
Oh... and your time-scale is way off. The MacOS X transition is now 5 years old, and the PPC transition was nearly a decade ago. That is not "a few years".
Mac's also enjoy a much longer average lifespan (usability, and dependability) than PC's with 5 years being close to average for corporate usage. 3 years is pushing it on the PC side.
There are quite a few points in the reference documentation where they specifically say that these boxes will not necessarily resemble the final shipping product. In other words,everyone already knows that they are useless for developing drivers, other than for things like printers, USB, and FireWire devices. All of those are already handled though hardware abstractions layers.
Only PCI (in all it's versions) and AGP (sort of-a PCI variant...) devices really need be concerned. And even there most of the time the kext system is already going to provide much of the hardware abstraction for you. You will just have to work on byte-order issues.
Unless, of course, Apple uses the new OpenFireware-like BIOS replacement they have been trying to get any one to use. The one where many drivers can be loaded by it, and be totally OS independent. Then things start to get interesting...
Actually... Apple does have a great recored on quality control. To the point that when they do have a bad product it is generally big news (the 17" Monitors for a while back, etc). I work for a school that is 30% Mac and 70% Dell. And the Dell's need to be replaced on a regular basis.
I just talked to a user who has gone through 4 of the same model in the last 2 years. There is nothing wrong with the power here, and dust is a bit of a problem... but not that much. And we see a lot of that. There are two motherboards sitting next to me that are going back to Dell.
In comparison, I am dealing with only my second hardware problem with a Mac in three months, and it is a hard drive in a laptop that SMART is reporting dying. The first issue was a Cube (5 years old) who's power supply got killed in a lab accident (got covered with a fluid). The power supply got replaced and the machine works fine. Oh there was a PRAM battery that went flat and caused some odd problems, but... that again shows how long the computer has been running.
I don't know about Russian Intelligence (just what the politicians were saying, which was anything but what the Bush administration was saying). But the German press was full of the reports from German intelligence, which was that there was nothing there.
You are correct that Iraq did not document the destruction of its Weapons of Mass destruction. But we went to war on the promise by the Bush administration that Iraq was actively in the process of building up an arsenal that could find its way into Al Qaeda hands.
We now know for facts that there were no real connections between Al Queda (at least less connection than currently exists with the Saudi government), and that there was not only no real program to make new weapons, but that there was effectively no useable WMD in the country. So how many people have died for what?
They were saying: "there is no evidence of WMD, give us time to prove that there is nothing". In contrast the Bush administration said that they had "compelling evidence" (sometimes using the word "proof") that they could not share for security reasons.
Turns out they had no evidence, let alone proof, because there was no weapons of mass-destruction program worth mentioning in Iraq. Oh... and the only ones who were saying that there was were the ex-Iraqis who everyone but the Bush administration had already written off as either delusional or having too much of an agenda to trust.
NetInfo is still used for the local accounts, and LDAP is one of the methods available for remote authentication (along with ActiveDirectory, Kerberos, etc...). This is all part of the OpenDirectory system, and there is no real sign that anything major is going to change.
MacOS X Server uses LDAP as one method to store user information, and also NetInfo (as "local users" that can still be vended out).
PS... this works very well, and is easy to admin. I don't see any reason to change things.
PPS... the documentation on how to create NetInfo directory master/client trees has disappeared, and I don't know if this is still possible.
But then you are asking the administration to pick a valedictorian on non-objective terms... so you are asking them to make a decision that someone's parents will object to. And in tragically many cases this means that the parent brings a lawsuit, and those cost the school district money, no mater how non-sencical they are.
No matter what the district has to pay lawyers to evaluate the case, and to take it through trial if it goes that way. More often they wind up paying money to make the problem just go away (cheaper than the costs of trial... let alone the possible results of a trial).
For those of you who would dismiss this as an issue: my mother is a ED teacher (for emotionally disturbed children... the worst of the worst) and every year at least one of her children are the subject of a lawsuit against the school. And she has no more than 15 kids per year.
Just imagine how much better the education system could be if there were some way of discouraging law suits like that (without killing the truly valid ones), and the money could be used to actually educate the kids.
And you don't want to even get me into the conversation about how constant testing creates and atmosphere that kills the chances for real learning.
I think that you are fairly safe. Apple has mearly announced that they are not going to produce new bindings for anything after 10.4. They have not marked them depreciated in 10.4 (even then the old bindings would still work), so you have at least through 10.5, and quite likely through 10.6 until your apps are no longer supported. You might even make it to 10.7...
Oddly, then the drinking age is birth in Wisconsin. With the presence (and consent) of a parent you are allowed to drink at any age in a bar. This is a seldom used law, and not everyone knows about it.
The first time I was in Vienna (named Wien in German) I arrived just in time for Wienerfest. It took me two days to finally realize it was not about sausage. My German has improved since then.
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AUII, a competing standard to RJ-45 Ethernet (BaseT). Sun also used them for a while, and at the time Apple decided on it it was the best bet... but since they were early they took the risk of betting on the wrong horse, and that was what happened.
PC's on the other hand were woefully late having Ethernet standard (on the motherboard). They are also now woefully late to have FireWire.
Ironically, Apple was late to having WiFi included in every Laptop. They were the first to have it in a laptop, the first to have the Antennas built into to every laptop, but they kept the actual card as a option for too long.
You are still not getting the point: if something corrupts/erases data from the RAID mirrors both copies are corrupted/erased. RAID is not about backup, it is about redundant hardware.
Umm... I think you got the point reversed. The poster was talking about the fact that you can take BSD licensed code, make changes to it to support your product, and not be forced to give your work to anyone else (for example your competition).
While we all understand the idea behind the GPL, many businesses will simply not even consider using OS's based on it because of the forced nature of it. FreeBSD stands to get a lot of users because of this in the embedded space.
Now, the gamble with the BSD license is that people might use the code without ever contributing back. But the bet is that the big companies will give some sort of kickback to the projects, even if it is not the complete solution.
An example of this is practice would be Apple and KHTML. While Apple has not completely given everything it could have given, the KHTML project has benefited from Apple using a derivative of KHTML. We can argue about whether it is enough, but it is benefit that Apple would not have contributed if KHTML were GPL rather than BSD. Management would not have touched it with a 10 foot pole.
To refer to the combination of North and South America (and Central America if you are so inclined to divide it that way) as a single continent is rather silly. It does not really make any sense from a geological perspective (then again neither does the Europe and Asia divide), a watershed one, a geopolitical one (unless you are talking about the Monroe Doctrine and that style of thinking), or a environmental/biological perspective.
The term "Americas" makes so much more sense. Once you are to that understanding, then it is no so far to shortening the USA to "America".
The problem is not that Firefox does not as gracefully handle incorrect html, it is that it does not handle broken html in exactly the same way as Internet Explorer. Some people don't really know what they are doing and just hack away until it looks like they want it to in their version of their browser (often IE). But if you look at it in another version of the same browser, or another browser altogether it fails in a different manner. The problem is that people then blame the browser for failing, when the real problem is with the page.
Note that this can be as much of a problem between different versions of Internet Explorer as between IE and Firefox
And there is no real way of exactly reproducing the failure modes of another piece of software without duplicating that software exactly... and we all know how illegal that would be (not to mention directly opposed to the point).
The real solution is the one that good web developers use: try to stick to the standards as closely as is possible (within the constraints of the browsers at hand), and always test in as many browsers and platforms as you can. It tends to mitigate the problems that you will encounter when newer browsers come out.
I guess you missed the tag line on the page:
Mighty Mouse © Viacom International Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*hint* Apple licensed it.
You don't license your hardware, but you do license your software. To put another spin on it, do you think it would be alright to buy copy of the latest Harry Potter book, copy out the text, and start selling your own printed versions? Notice I am not talking about loaning your book to that person, but actually making a copy. You are always free to loan your computer (and the software on it) to a friend.
Then why would Naked Fridays be anything different?
I remind you that Steve Balmer works at Microsoft... it is not a pretty thought.
Hmmm.... lets see here...
user information stored in NetInfo
inetd not process 1 (and not present in many configurations)
no ports or packages system (other equivalents though)
display model (the primary one) not X-11 at all.
Mach kernel...
the framework system
90% of the API completely different (AppKit, CoreFoundation, Foundation, Core*, *Kit)
driver model completely different
It is obvious that you have never actually admined or developed on either FreeBSD or MacOS X.
Phil Shiller said that Apple would not actively be preventing people from running Windows on Apple boxes. And why would they? On the same token, why would they do any work at all to make Windows run on their boxes?
My guess is that without a bit of work Windows will not install on the final boxes, and will always be a hack: a few people will do it, but the majority won't bother. And that would suit Apple just fine.
I disagree with much of what you said:
The Ports system is far superior to the rpm system. It actually tracks dependancies, and has a system to grab them for you. You are way off base on that statement.
FreeBSD is a full OS. I have no idea what you mean by your statement.
Yes, compiling from source does take a long time. Have you tried the pre-compiled package system? Same dependancy tracking but with pre-compiled binaries?
FreeBSD has the best documentation of any of the unix-like OS's that I have found. The handbook covers lots of cases.
FreeBSD also has softupdates... very much like Journaling. And that is on by default through the auto command in the installer.
And I think you are missing the point of FreeBSD, it is a server OS... I think most of your complaints come from the fact that there is no GUI by default. This is because you don't usually sit on the console on FreeBSD servers.
1) The Newton was the first PDA, and the first ones were the size of a current Palm/PocketPC. You are thinking of the later Newton 2K series. And for the markets that were actually buying these devices at the time (Doctors and Industry) they were the right product. Those markets were just not big enough.
2) For the computers it was designed for Cooperative Multitasking was the correct choice. Preemptive takes too much processor power for those older computers. Remember, Apple started doing this when there was no such thing as multitasking on the PC. Apple was stuck with the choice for a while, but has now gotten out of it.
3) You are overstating it, and it is not the machines that have been left behind, but the OS.
4) I own a Cube, and still use it daily, and you are just plain wrong about it. I have not had any heat problems, and how often do you change your peripherals.
5) You are mistaking MHz for speed. You can learn why this is a mistake many places. You are also forgetting that the mini (or Macintosh in general) is not being about as cheap as possible. If you compare it against comparable computers you will find that it is very competitive.
6) No, MacOS X is not a certified UNIX OS. The only OS currently available that is (that I am aware of) is SCO UNIX. Linux is not, the BSD's are not, Solaris is not. What is your point?
MacOS X is a OS in the tradition of unix (notice the lower case name), and is mostly POSIX compliant (but not certified as such). That is what really matters.
7) PPC is a great chip, but there is not enough research going into it to keep it competitive. In 2 years, when Apple's transition is complete there will be no PPC chip that is competitive. That is what came out of negotiations between Apple and IBM (after the relationship with Motorola/FreeScale suffered a similar fate).
Oh... and Altivec is significantly better than SSE2 (which is significantly better than SSE, which is significantly better than MMX). No one who has done real research in the field disputes this. But Apple is not going to be using chips with SSE2, they are going to be using SSE2's successor, the one that Intel is promising will be much more Altivec-like.
8) Most desktops are going towards XP, and everything points to Longhorn being even more of that treatment. In comparison Aqua looks very professional. And I think you are just wrong even with the comparison to Win2K.
9) On software longevity you simply don't know what you are talking about. I have programs from system 6 that still run in MacOS X's Classic layer. There we are talking about a contemporary with DOS... and at the end of its life Win3.1. Do you have any Win 3.1 software that still runs?
There are lots of programs that don't work, but most of those touch hardware, and the same rules apply to Windows as they do Mac.
Oh... and your time-scale is way off. The MacOS X transition is now 5 years old, and the PPC transition was nearly a decade ago. That is not "a few years".
Mac's also enjoy a much longer average lifespan (usability, and dependability) than PC's with 5 years being close to average for corporate usage. 3 years is pushing it on the PC side.
Note: occasionally rings up a Mac mini at Best Buy != "Apple Rep."
There are quite a few points in the reference documentation where they specifically say that these boxes will not necessarily resemble the final shipping product. In other words,everyone already knows that they are useless for developing drivers, other than for things like printers, USB, and FireWire devices. All of those are already handled though hardware abstractions layers.
Only PCI (in all it's versions) and AGP (sort of-a PCI variant...) devices really need be concerned. And even there most of the time the kext system is already going to provide much of the hardware abstraction for you. You will just have to work on byte-order issues.
Unless, of course, Apple uses the new OpenFireware-like BIOS replacement they have been trying to get any one to use. The one where many drivers can be loaded by it, and be totally OS independent. Then things start to get interesting...
It does not require you, but it does prompt you for it. This has been part of the sysinstall system for as long as I can remember.
Actually... Apple does have a great recored on quality control. To the point that when they do have a bad product it is generally big news (the 17" Monitors for a while back, etc). I work for a school that is 30% Mac and 70% Dell. And the Dell's need to be replaced on a regular basis.
I just talked to a user who has gone through 4 of the same model in the last 2 years. There is nothing wrong with the power here, and dust is a bit of a problem... but not that much. And we see a lot of that. There are two motherboards sitting next to me that are going back to Dell.
In comparison, I am dealing with only my second hardware problem with a Mac in three months, and it is a hard drive in a laptop that SMART is reporting dying. The first issue was a Cube (5 years old) who's power supply got killed in a lab accident (got covered with a fluid). The power supply got replaced and the machine works fine. Oh there was a PRAM battery that went flat and caused some odd problems, but... that again shows how long the computer has been running.
I don't know about Russian Intelligence (just what the politicians were saying, which was anything but what the Bush administration was saying). But the German press was full of the reports from German intelligence, which was that there was nothing there.
You are correct that Iraq did not document the destruction of its Weapons of Mass destruction. But we went to war on the promise by the Bush administration that Iraq was actively in the process of building up an arsenal that could find its way into Al Qaeda hands.
We now know for facts that there were no real connections between Al Queda (at least less connection than currently exists with the Saudi government), and that there was not only no real program to make new weapons, but that there was effectively no useable WMD in the country. So how many people have died for what?
They were saying: "there is no evidence of WMD, give us time to prove that there is nothing". In contrast the Bush administration said that they had "compelling evidence" (sometimes using the word "proof") that they could not share for security reasons.
Turns out they had no evidence, let alone proof, because there was no weapons of mass-destruction program worth mentioning in Iraq. Oh... and the only ones who were saying that there was were the ex-Iraqis who everyone but the Bush administration had already written off as either delusional or having too much of an agenda to trust.
NetInfo is still used for the local accounts, and LDAP is one of the methods available for remote authentication (along with ActiveDirectory, Kerberos, etc...). This is all part of the OpenDirectory system, and there is no real sign that anything major is going to change.
MacOS X Server uses LDAP as one method to store user information, and also NetInfo (as "local users" that can still be vended out).
PS... this works very well, and is easy to admin. I don't see any reason to change things.
PPS... the documentation on how to create NetInfo directory master/client trees has disappeared, and I don't know if this is still possible.
But then you are asking the administration to pick a valedictorian on non-objective terms... so you are asking them to make a decision that someone's parents will object to. And in tragically many cases this means that the parent brings a lawsuit, and those cost the school district money, no mater how non-sencical they are.
No matter what the district has to pay lawyers to evaluate the case, and to take it through trial if it goes that way. More often they wind up paying money to make the problem just go away (cheaper than the costs of trial... let alone the possible results of a trial).
For those of you who would dismiss this as an issue: my mother is a ED teacher (for emotionally disturbed children... the worst of the worst) and every year at least one of her children are the subject of a lawsuit against the school. And she has no more than 15 kids per year.
Just imagine how much better the education system could be if there were some way of discouraging law suits like that (without killing the truly valid ones), and the money could be used to actually educate the kids.
And you don't want to even get me into the conversation about how constant testing creates and atmosphere that kills the chances for real learning.
I think that you are fairly safe. Apple has mearly announced that they are not going to produce new bindings for anything after 10.4. They have not marked them depreciated in 10.4 (even then the old bindings would still work), so you have at least through 10.5, and quite likely through 10.6 until your apps are no longer supported. You might even make it to 10.7...
Oddly, then the drinking age is birth in Wisconsin. With the presence (and consent) of a parent you are allowed to drink at any age in a bar. This is a seldom used law, and not everyone knows about it.
The first time I was in Vienna (named Wien in German) I arrived just in time for Wienerfest. It took me two days to finally realize it was not about sausage. My German has improved since then.
Don't you just love exchange rates and VAT (US Prices never include sales tax)?