Well, technically, Mac OS X server also supports virtualization.
Mac OS X Server is licensed to run in a virtual environment when the host is running on Apple hardware. Actual support from virtualization software is lacking, and limited to Parallels and VMware for OS X only.
Solaris is supported and certified to run on xVM, VMware ESX and VirtualBox on SLE 11; this means that Sun will provide support for running it on these virtual environments. Solaris is supported by VMware's virtualization products as well, and can run as a Xen guest.
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.
on
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I rather doubt it, the timelines don't fit. "USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 [...]. The case was settled out of court in 1993 [...]."
So what if the case was settled in 1993? As a result of the case, the AT&T code was removed from free BSD distributions. FreeBSD didn't have a cleaned-up release version until 1995.
Sun had a great history but they just aren't as relevant anymore, there is little they have that redhat ( for example ) don't.
Solaris has two features compelling to me: Zones and ZFS.
The lack of a comparable feature to Zones (or even FreeBSD jails) in the mainline Linux kernel / major distributions is disappointing. There's OpenVZ, which I like and use, but it's a fairly significant patch on top of the Linux kernel. They don't track the mainline Linux kernel (which doesn't both me; I run CentOS 5).
Interix was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX
Do you have any proof?
However, there is nothing they could do to stop the Windows community from doing the port. The reason it's not happening is because Microsoft and Microsoft collaborators aren't interested in becoming helpful collaborating members of the community.
Which leads to the question why didn't Microsoft just go ahead and fix it. Answer; because then it would be difficult to kill it later. Interix might be a sane choice for an organisation which was trying to eliminate old UNIX installs and just had a few applications which were difficult to rewrite at the current time.
I think this is the target audience: organizations who want to run UNIX applications on Windows in a supported way. It's probably not indented for people who want a complete GNU system. (Recent packages ship with GCC and GDB, but otherwise come with BSD or SVR4-derived utilities.)
Some of the other systems you mentioned should be, logically, looking at their design and historical position before Linux really took off and the number of products developed from them which could have contributed to their develomement dominating the market. However they have failed. The reason is simple. Every time someone comes up with a product based on a non copyleft system (OS-X; JunOS, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack, IPSO etc. etc.) the community divides between those working on the product and those working on the OS
Surely the BSD lawsuit had something to do with Linux taking off instead of BSD?
Compare with Linux where the majority of contributions actually come from commercial organisations where the GPL has allowed those organisations to stay in the community instead of being forced to fork.
Many of these contributions come from organizations that have an interest of advancing Linux in general. But some organizations that do use Linux and GNU software don't contribute much back - consider many of the consumer electronics devices that run GPL software, such as consumer broadband routers. Some provide the source as required by the GPL, but not much else - for example, the Linux source used might be available, but the wifi driver might be a binary module. These organizations don't really stay in the community or fork; they provide the GPL source code for whatever they use, including the modifications.
These organizations use GPL software because it's cheaper; their "contributions" to the community might amount to being mostly useless to anyone, or only useful to those who want to hack the devices the software runs on. What exactly am I going to do with the GPL source code used by my TV, for example?
I haven't seen a recent smartphone that is on (and I don't mean, "displays something", I mean "fully usable") within 7 seconds. Even if you factor out the ID number input, 7 seconds is not too far fetched for current phones, overcramped with "features".
How often do people reboot their phones? My BlackBerry's uptime is about 13 months; I've rebooted it once since I got in 2008.
That's pretty quick, but it's in line with my experience on Linux. On the other hand, try it on a Mac, then you'll get a new definition of slowness. OpenOffice.org takes some 30 seconds to fully load on my work Mac (MacBook Pro, 2.2 GHz C2D, 2 GB RAM). But OpenOffice.org is not alone in being slow on the Mac while much faster on other platforms. At work, our primary development environment is Netbeans, which takes ages (around 50-60 seconds) to get to a workable state on the Mac, but takes just around 10 seconds on a comparable Linux machine.
Loading Office in Wine/Crossover is typically faster than loading any native OS X office suite I've tried, including Office for Mac or iWork. And if you already have the VM loaded, it's faster to Windows Office in a Windows VM.
Apple tends to hang more on the bleeding edge, and is naturally going to run into more frequent hardware failures as a result. Things like mandatory cameras, backlit keyboards, ambient light sensors, 11N, drop-head-parking, DVI, etc. I suppose in that respect a lot of Apple buyers are comparable to other brands' "early adopters", and the tradeoffs that brings.
Apple isn't the only computer company selling systems with those features. Backlit keyboards, ambient light sensors, and accelerometers have been found in non-Apple notebooks for years, but often only in the "business" models.
What's more important to most people is the support they get when they have a problem. (and then the tables turn, violently)
Other manufacturers sell extended warranties too - sometimes with better terms than AppleCare. In general, you do need to buy a higher quality/more expensive "business" system and warranty though. As an individual, I can go to Dell's website and order a Latitude laptop with next business day service. With AppleCare and a laptop, I have to take it to an authorized repair shop (luckily, there are more of these than just Apple owned retail stores.)
Apple might have better service options available, but they don't seem to be marketed online...
I do think that when Macs have problems, they have BIG problems, but overall they have proven (to me anyway) that they are generally much more reliable than systems made by Windows PC vendors.
Apple isn't the only vendor that makes relatively high quality laptops; other major vendors sell systems of various quality. The Dell Latitude, Lenovo ThinkPad, and HP Compaq (business) lines are generally much higher quality than each manufacturer's consumer lines. But only the consumer models are sold in US retail. Typically one doesn't even see the business models on the vendor's website unless going into the business section.
Yes; it was a rhetorical question. The fact that they have to do this means that vulnerabilites are often published and fixed well after the initial release of a package.
You have to admit, it's pretty hard to know in advance which distro you're on and which packages are going to be available, so you have to plan to try a whole pile of exploits before you find one that works.
Maybe. But diversity isn't so important when you have one or two very popular targets. And some distributions' packages have modified version information identifying the distribution. For example, Ubuntu's Firefox build includes the distribution name and version in the user agent. Furthermore, many desktop Linux installs come from live CDs that install a default set of packages.
The biggest or most common vulnerabilities are usually found, fixed, and ready for update rather quickly, so the window of opportunity is smaller as well.
I've never seen any conclusive evidence that vulnerabilities are frequently found soon after they are put into the code. There was a Linux vulnerability found this year that affected kernels 2.4 and 2.6, for example. How often do people check previous (frequently unsupported) versions of the code? How many security fixes do Red Hat and Novell backport to their enterprise distributions, which frequently run "old" software (relative to Ubuntu/Fedora)?
If the attack fails, you're restricted to listening on high ports and any other potential damage is minimized.
Damage to the operating system isn't a big deal. There are plenty of copies of most operating systems on the Internet, and if the operating system was already installed by an end-user once, he or she can simply install it again. A malicious program running as a normal user has access to the user's home directory, and from there can copy, modify, or delete that information, or perhaps manipulate the web browser to steal user input.
I would still argue that though a worm could flourish under a specific user's account, it would still allow the damage be contained to that one user's account. Would you agree?
That's true, and that's my point. It is the contents of user accounts that users care about. The difference between "a worm stealing all of a user's personal information, leading to identity theft" and "a worm stealing all of a user's personal information and breaking the operating system" isn't that significant after the user's personal information has been stolen. Reinstalling/re-imaging an operating system is trivial compared to repairing identity theft or losing important information. If my OS gets corrupted, things aren't so bad - there are copies of the OS on the Internet and on DVD.
Do you also challenge my point's validity concerning traditional viruses, activex drive-by downloads, and the like? If so, what advantage would there be for desktop users in not having root access for all users, in your opinion?
On a single user system, the advantage of running as a unprivileged user is somewhat exaggerated unless steps are taken to limit that user's privileges beyond the default (for example, by only allowing trusted processes to be executed.)
MySQL has much more of the web back end market than Oracle does. I have yet to see anyone implement a website with Oracle - I'm sure there are somewhere, but with the share of MySQL?
Open source Web applications often use MySQL because it's popular, free, and open source. That doesn't make it a good choice; there are other products that are much better at just about everything MySQL does, and some are free/open source.
MySQL is widely deployed on commodity web hosting providers. Consequently, it's often used by noncommercial or low revenue sites whose traffic can be adequately handled by MySQL.
You're office suite analogy isn't applicable because they are in the same markets. Oracle and MySQL are not. Oracle has the business infrastructure and business management software, whereas, MySQL is used mostly for web backends.
There are estimated to be over 12 million MySQL installations worldwide.
And many of these are powering toy applications.
I can't find hard numbers on Sybase or Oracle, but assuming that Oracle and Sybase are about as popular as DB2, then the number of MySQL installations is nearly as many as all three of those vendors combined.
But this is a baseless assumption. In terms of revenue, Oracle is by far the biggest. Unless Oracle is significantly more expensive than the competition, they almost certainly have more installations than you claim.
On Intel systems OS X loads either a i386 or x86_64 kernel. OS X says a system is running the "64-bit Kernel and Extensions" when the x86_64 kernel is loaded. Assuming an x86_64 capable CPU, either kernel will run x86_64 processes. It has nothing to do with stuff I do or don't understand.
Feel free to argue that both kernels are 64-bit kernels if they can both run 64-bit processes, but everyone else will still call what Apple labels the 32-bit kernel a 32-bit kernel.
A IA32 operating system can not run AMD64 processes, it is physically impossible. A AMD64 kernel can however run IA32 processes. No matter how awesome you think Apple are they are still using the same CPUs and 64bit mode is simply not available from 32bit mode (what would be the point?). Compatibility mode is however available from 64bit mode.
You are clueless. For the last few years, millions of OS X Intel users have running kernels that operate in 32-bit kernel mode and are capable of running 64-bit processes. (It actually uses PAE for addressing in all cases, I believe.) For the past few months, most of the processes executed have been 64-bit as well, on Snow Leopard.
Of course, the 32-bit kernel itself probably has some 64-bit code. But the kernel itself runs on 32-bit mode and runs 32-bit drivers.
OS X isn't the only x86 software to do this. VMware ESX(i) versions before 4 ran a 32-bit kernel and could run 64-bit guests. Some desktop virtualization programs can run 64-bit guests on top of a 32-bit Windows or Linux kernel.
Solaris on Intel is the same way: it ships the 32-bit and 64-bit kernels and can use either.
Moving installed systems from 64-bit to 32-bit? I think that's very rarely done, and personally I wouldn't waste any disk space on making it possible.
AFAIK, an OS X installation can be used to boot any Mac supported by that OS version. It's not like Windows or Linux, which use the BIOS to load the kernel and a set of drivers required to load the rest of the OS... and will fail if the drivers loaded before starting the kernel are not sufficient to load the rest of the OS.
This would be useful when booting from external media, but given the few Intel Macs sold with 32-bit processors, it's not too common. But I've moved from 64-bit to 32-bit PCs a few times; from a single core Athlon 64 desktop to a 32-bit Core Duo laptop, and later from a 64-bit Core 2 Duo laptop to a 32-bit Atom.
Not sure, but I think so. You probably best remember it from 15 years ago when you tried running a Windows 3.1 application in DOS and got "This program cannot be run in DOS mode"
That still exists, even on x86-64 Intel executables. But that's not what I was asking about.
OS X on Intel has assumed the presence of SSE3 since the beginning (all Intel Macs have it) and won't work at all on x86 without SSE2. It's not compiled for i386 or i686.
OS X's gcc uses SSE2 instead of x87 floating point by default.
The 32-bit vs. 64-bit split is handled pretty well on Linux (well, Debian drug its heels a bit on multiarch handling in packages, but even they seem to be getting with the programme).
I disagree. Solaris and Mac OS X are the only operating systems I would say handle it well.
OS X 10.6 includes i386 and x86_64 versions of almost everything. By default it runs the x86_64 versions on compatible CPUs and compiles software as x86_64. It runs the i386 kernel by default, but the OS X i386 kernel is capable of running 64 bit processes.
One can reuse the same OS X installation from a system with a 64-bit CPU on a system with a 32-bit CPU.
Solaris includes 32-bit binaries for most applications but includes 32- and 64-bit libraries. It includes 32- and 64-bit kernels as well, all in the same installation media.
There's much more to the question of whether or not something will run on an arbitrary copy of Linux than the CPU arch.
This issue would limit the usefulness of a fat ELF feature, but it seems this is a problem that should be solved regardless of the existence of fat ELF support.
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Mac OS X Server is licensed to run in a virtual environment when the host is running on Apple hardware. Actual support from virtualization software is lacking, and limited to Parallels and VMware for OS X only.
Solaris is supported and certified to run on xVM, VMware ESX and VirtualBox on SLE 11; this means that Sun will provide support for running it on these virtual environments. Solaris is supported by VMware's virtualization products as well, and can run as a Xen guest.
So what if the case was settled in 1993? As a result of the case, the AT&T code was removed from free BSD distributions. FreeBSD didn't have a cleaned-up release version until 1995.
The next major version of Solaris will be based on OpenSolaris. (Sort of like how Red Hat uses Fedora as a base for RHEL.)
Solaris has two features compelling to me: Zones and ZFS.
The lack of a comparable feature to Zones (or even FreeBSD jails) in the mainline Linux kernel / major distributions is disappointing. There's OpenVZ, which I like and use, but it's a fairly significant patch on top of the Linux kernel. They don't track the mainline Linux kernel (which doesn't both me; I run CentOS 5).
Solaris is supported on VMware, which gives it more hardware support than Mac OS X.
Do you have any proof?
What would you consider the SUA community?
I think this is the target audience: organizations who want to run UNIX applications on Windows in a supported way. It's probably not indented for people who want a complete GNU system. (Recent packages ship with GCC and GDB, but otherwise come with BSD or SVR4-derived utilities.)
Surely the BSD lawsuit had something to do with Linux taking off instead of BSD?
Many of these contributions come from organizations that have an interest of advancing Linux in general.
But some organizations that do use Linux and GNU software don't contribute much back - consider many of the consumer electronics devices that run GPL software, such as consumer broadband routers. Some provide the source as required by the GPL, but not much else - for example, the Linux source used might be available, but the wifi driver might be a binary module. These organizations don't really stay in the community or fork; they provide the GPL source code for whatever they use, including the modifications.
These organizations use GPL software because it's cheaper; their "contributions" to the community might amount to being mostly useless to anyone, or only useful to those who want to hack the devices the software runs on. What exactly am I going to do with the GPL source code used by my TV, for example?
How often do people reboot their phones? My BlackBerry's uptime is about 13 months; I've rebooted it once since I got in 2008.
Loading Office in Wine/Crossover is typically faster than loading any native OS X office suite I've tried, including Office for Mac or iWork. And if you already have the VM loaded, it's faster to Windows Office in a Windows VM.
Apple isn't the only computer company selling systems with those features. Backlit keyboards, ambient light sensors, and accelerometers have been found in non-Apple notebooks for years, but often only in the "business" models.
Other manufacturers sell extended warranties too - sometimes with better terms than AppleCare. In general, you do need to buy a higher quality/more expensive "business" system and warranty though. As an individual, I can go to Dell's website and order a Latitude laptop with next business day service. With AppleCare and a laptop, I have to take it to an authorized repair shop (luckily, there are more of these than just Apple owned retail stores.)
Apple might have better service options available, but they don't seem to be marketed online...
Apple isn't the only vendor that makes relatively high quality laptops; other major vendors sell systems of various quality. The Dell Latitude, Lenovo ThinkPad, and HP Compaq (business) lines are generally much higher quality than each manufacturer's consumer lines. But only the consumer models are sold in US retail. Typically one doesn't even see the business models on the vendor's website unless going into the business section.
Yes; it was a rhetorical question. The fact that they have to do this means that vulnerabilites are often published and fixed well after the initial release of a package.
Maybe. But diversity isn't so important when you have one or two very popular targets. And some distributions' packages have modified version information identifying the distribution. For example, Ubuntu's Firefox build includes the distribution name and version in the user agent. Furthermore, many desktop Linux installs come from live CDs that install a default set of packages.
I've never seen any conclusive evidence that vulnerabilities are frequently found soon after they are put into the code. There was a Linux vulnerability found this year that affected kernels 2.4 and 2.6, for example. How often do people check previous (frequently unsupported) versions of the code? How many security fixes do Red Hat and Novell backport to their enterprise distributions, which frequently run "old" software (relative to Ubuntu/Fedora)?
Damage to the operating system isn't a big deal. There are plenty of copies of most operating systems on the Internet, and if the operating system was already installed by an end-user once, he or she can simply install it again. A malicious program running as a normal user has access to the user's home directory, and from there can copy, modify, or delete that information, or perhaps manipulate the web browser to steal user input.
That's true, and that's my point. It is the contents of user accounts that users care about. The difference between "a worm stealing all of a user's personal information, leading to identity theft" and "a worm stealing all of a user's personal information and breaking the operating system" isn't that significant after the user's personal information has been stolen. Reinstalling/re-imaging an operating system is trivial compared to repairing identity theft or losing important information. If my OS gets corrupted, things aren't so bad - there are copies of the OS on the Internet and on DVD.
On a single user system, the advantage of running as a unprivileged user is somewhat exaggerated unless steps are taken to limit that user's privileges beyond the default (for example, by only allowing trusted processes to be executed.)
I wasn't concerned about listening, actually, just outgoing connections.
How many desktop Linux users have firewalls that prevent untrusted processes from making outgoing TCP connections?
Bullshit. Worms need not require a privileged user account to be effective. A process running as an unprivileged user can:
Open source Web applications often use MySQL because it's popular, free, and open source. That doesn't make it a good choice; there are other products that are much better at just about everything MySQL does, and some are free/open source.
MySQL is widely deployed on commodity web hosting providers. Consequently, it's often used by noncommercial or low revenue sites whose traffic can be adequately handled by MySQL.
Oracle competes with MySQL in the "free RDBMS" market. Oracle is missing the "open source" and "widely deployed on cheap hosting" parts. Oracle Database can be used for free without violating the license and without paying for it, but with limitations MySQL does not have.
I don't see anything on that page that substantiates your claim.
"market share" as measured in US dollars (and in 2007), not current installations or licenses sold.
And many of these are powering toy applications.
But this is a baseless assumption. In terms of revenue, Oracle is by far the biggest. Unless Oracle is significantly more expensive than the competition, they almost certainly have more installations than you claim.
On Intel systems OS X loads either a i386 or x86_64 kernel. OS X says a system is running the "64-bit Kernel and Extensions" when the x86_64 kernel is loaded. Assuming an x86_64 capable CPU, either kernel will run x86_64 processes. It has nothing to do with stuff I do or don't understand.
Feel free to argue that both kernels are 64-bit kernels if they can both run 64-bit processes, but everyone else will still call what Apple labels the 32-bit kernel a 32-bit kernel.
You are clueless. For the last few years, millions of OS X Intel users have running kernels that operate in 32-bit kernel mode and are capable of running 64-bit processes. (It actually uses PAE for addressing in all cases, I believe.) For the past few months, most of the processes executed have been 64-bit as well, on Snow Leopard.
Of course, the 32-bit kernel itself probably has some 64-bit code. But the kernel itself runs on 32-bit mode and runs 32-bit drivers.
OS X isn't the only x86 software to do this. VMware ESX(i) versions before 4 ran a 32-bit kernel and could run 64-bit guests. Some desktop virtualization programs can run 64-bit guests on top of a 32-bit Windows or Linux kernel.
Solaris on Intel is the same way: it ships the 32-bit and 64-bit kernels and can use either.
AFAIK, an OS X installation can be used to boot any Mac supported by that OS version. It's not like Windows or Linux, which use the BIOS to load the kernel and a set of drivers required to load the rest of the OS... and will fail if the drivers loaded before starting the kernel are not sufficient to load the rest of the OS.
This would be useful when booting from external media, but given the few Intel Macs sold with 32-bit processors, it's not too common. But I've moved from 64-bit to 32-bit PCs a few times; from a single core Athlon 64 desktop to a 32-bit Core Duo laptop, and later from a 64-bit Core 2 Duo laptop to a 32-bit Atom.
That still exists, even on x86-64 Intel executables. But that's not what I was asking about.
OS X on Intel has assumed the presence of SSE3 since the beginning (all Intel Macs have it) and won't work at all on x86 without SSE2. It's not compiled for i386 or i686.
OS X's gcc uses SSE2 instead of x87 floating point by default.
I disagree. Solaris and Mac OS X are the only operating systems I would say handle it well.
OS X 10.6 includes i386 and x86_64 versions of almost everything. By default it runs the x86_64 versions on compatible CPUs and compiles software as x86_64. It runs the i386 kernel by default, but the OS X i386 kernel is capable of running 64 bit processes.
One can reuse the same OS X installation from a system with a 64-bit CPU on a system with a 32-bit CPU.
Solaris includes 32-bit binaries for most applications but includes 32- and 64-bit libraries. It includes 32- and 64-bit kernels as well, all in the same installation media.
This issue would limit the usefulness of a fat ELF feature, but it seems this is a problem that should be solved regardless of the existence of fat ELF support.