Because Apple is using technology licensed without restrictions,... the company can use Mach code,
exploit what the open source community has done, make proprietary modifications, and give
back nothing of substance. And that appears to be exactly what Apple has done.
This seems factually incorrect. They've given back code to FreeBSD. While it's certainly true that Apple isn't "all open-source, all the time," that's different from the claims made in the article. Where they've taken BSD code, they've given back code.
Some of what the author said is true, but not under the guise he presents it. It's FUD.
Yes exactly. There are two essential rules when it comes to do-it-yourself convergence versus convergence-in-a-box. One is, as you mentioned, reliability and upgradability - one box means one horribly expensive part to replace if something goes wrong. Component cards oppose the 'in a box' concept - you're not supposed to have to much around inside this box, are you?
The other issue is quality. The quality of components will always have the potential to be higher - partially because someone designing a component doesn't have to trade quality in this part for quality in some other part, and partially because, well, the market for a component that just plays CDs can't be subdued by a poor CD player with a pretty good tape player attached. Also partially because you can't get away with no-name (or bad-name) parts the same way - in a shelf stereo, nobody notices prima facie the fact that the CD part was made by child labor in China; not so with a CD component - you're buying a CD component made by child labor in China, or you're not.
To think that an 'in-a-box' system can have precisely the featureset that you want it to have is contrary to the experience of years and years in the PC industry - that a pre-built system may be good enough, but it's never cutting edge, optimal, or right for every circumstance.
Not only that, but after he invariably beat me, he'd write down a transcript of the game - every move from start to finish, complete with detail of where I went wrong - and pass it over to me.
That's exactly the sort of note I'd like to see a teacher snatch and ask the student to read... somehow I doubt the 'goofing off instead of getting an education' argument would work too well.
Sadly, the only year I played chess via notes in high school, the teacher for the period in which I had a willing opponent was largely uninterested in catching us pass notes.
Well, that was assumed:) My point was that saying "OS X stole from NeXTStep" is ridiculous, and that "NeXTStep stole from MacOS" only slightly less so. Actually, I think that Apple should have at least acknowledged what they got from Xerox, and likewise MS should acknowledge that their pretty new interface is pretty dated as well. But that would be "off message" for both of them, who both claim to be the sole creators of the wares they're hawking.
What it comes down to is that BSDi is Telenet Systems plus some change and Windriver is BSDi plus some change. Or, put another way, if Telenet Systems had changed its name to iXsystems, and Wind River had directly acquired BSDI, we would be at pretty much the same point.
And OS X stole from NeXT and NeXT stole from Mac and Mac stole from Smalltalk.
Who is CEO of the company that produced OS X? Steve Jobs. Who was the CEO of the company that produced NeXTstep? Steve Jobs. Who was the CEO of the company that produced MacOS? Steve Jobs. The only possible 'theft' that might have occured is when Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple and started NeXT, and mimicked the interface - but who here would really fault him since he started a new company trying to do the exact same thing he tried to do when he and Woz started the first company?
Either you've got waaay more debt than I do, or you're estimating your financial needs incorrectly. I have a pretty decent amount of debt (of all sorts - student loans for 5 years of expensive college, bank loans, credit, regular bills, money owed to friends, and I'm largely supporting my fiance), and I'm not making that much since I work for a university. Things still work out pretty well financially - I have some stress from it, just enough to keep me on my toes.
So, my advice? If you're going into IT of any sort, don't sweat the money. You'll probably make enough money to handle the debt and have a life, even if you won't be able to afford a new sports car immediately. Decide what you actually want to do, and how you want to approach that.
For that matter, keep in mind that, as I recall, a lot of student debt can be held off if you go to grad school, and a Master's or doctorate
in CS leads to a lot of different kinds of careers than a BS (not necessarily better, but different).
Most of all, my advice would be: don't sweat the money too much. Look at what you want, and what choices now can help you get there. If there's something about a company that makes you feel they'll hold you back from what you want, hesitate only a little before deciding to ignore them.
Yeah, unless you need a PDA today. They're incredibly useful regardless of whether they have an upgrade path. I would still be happy with my two year old Palm III if it hadn't gotten busted.
OK, it's great that Windows supports open-on-hover (or whatever you want to call it). Just out of curiosity, since when? I'm pretty sure not since '95...:)
However, Ctrl-X/C/V sounds wrong. Let me repeat my question: can you paste a list of filenames to a text entry box? Can you accidentally stop the operation by copying something else to the clipboard (what happens if you cut the files to move them, and then copy something else to the clipboard? oops)? I haven't got a Windows system available on which to test this, but if it doesn't do both, it does it wrong. OS/2, incidentally, has had a superior form of this feature(1) for some time.
There's also the problem of Windows having no idea whether it wants Ctrl-X,C,V or Shift-Insert,Ctrl-Insert, and Ctrl-Delete, and this feature only reenforces that.
1. It doesn't purport to use the clipboard, it gives you visual feedback (the pointer changes)
when something is 'picked up,' and it doesn't interfere with other operations (like regular cut and paste).
My point was that you can download files and they will be assigned reasonable file types without user intervention.
Over all, I think that MacOS's 4-char type and 4-char creator attributes suck, but at least it's not tying the file type to the file name like Windows.
I'm saddened that such a stupid troll got moderated up. I've got several friends who also use OS/2, and I've got several co-workers (at a Unix shop) who also use Macs, not counting all of my student friends who benefit from Macs. I only know of a couple of people who use BeOS, and in fact, I think that BeOS overall isn't very interesting - but they nailed the filesystem, and the file typing system.
The point is - and I'm saying this for the benefit of moderators who think that you are an insightful person - that it's not important how successful these other operating systems are/were. If we're not copying Windows (OK, Gnome is trying), then we're either striking out on our own without any idea of UI design, or we're trying to copy from other people with good UI design skills - like the MacOS, OS/2, and BeOS developers.
Putting them in the clipboard is a horrible semantic idea. Can you paste the list of filenames into a text window?
OS/2 and MacOS both do this better: in OS/2, you can put a drag 'on hold' and go do other things (without holding your mouse button down), and then later go ahead and drop. In MacOS, you can hover a drag over a folder and it will open after a second, letting you navigate without ever clicking on a folder
Bzzzt, sorry. OS/2, MacOS, and BeOS all solved the 'file extension/file type' problem a long time ago, without the MS hack that leads to 'x.jpg.vbs' exploits in MIME clients. MacOS has the most consistent way of doing things (specifically for downloaded files), but they all handle it.
OS/2 (and possibly BeOS) also support command-line querying and setting of file types,
and Unix has had the file 'magic' command for some time to identify file types based on their contents.
so... check the Arena Array, it's a harware RAID box, with a SCSI interface, but with IDE bays! it uses a separate IDE channel for each drive, so the througput is as high as possible, and the host interface is SCSI, so you can use those low-CPU-demmanding cards.
No, the throughput is not as high as possible. It's better, sure, and it will take a load away from the CPU, which might be sufficient, but not the best. The problem is that each IDE drive can still only service one request at a time; thus, optimally, you can handle n requests for n drives. Since the article specified input and output, you can't do a simple RAID1 system to handle n reads of any data. Instead he has to go with striping, which would lead to having n reads and/or writes distributed across n drives if each request is for data on a different drive.
My advice? If you can afford new hardware, buy the best you can afford; the Arena Array may be sufficient, and it will certainly be better, but you'll need to do some resarch - how many concurrent connections, how are the file requests and uploads distributed, etc. - to see if you can expect an IDE array to fix your problems.
It boils down to either a) the problem has to be solved, and you'll just have to do whatever it takes to fix it (and I don't think you'll fix it with software), or b) you'd like to fix it but it's not that important. In the case of b), hdparm might be your best bet, as well as making sure you have a NIC that doesn't need a lot of hand-holding by the CPU.
That's what makes symmetric encryption algorithms so useful. You allow someone the ability to decode your message without giving them the ability to encrypt a message as you.
Errr... I think you mean asymmetric encryption. Symmetric algorithms use the same key for encryption and decryption, so there is no difference between sender and recipient.
Similarly, there's a CGI script called inf2html that converts GNU info documentation into HTML. Between the two, you can have a single semi-unified portal to all standard documentation available online. Not sure of where it canonically is located, but I bet google can tell you.
Man pages are extremely adequate for almost every purpose, and most software. There are a few reasonable criticisms, and a lot of unreasonable ones... here goes:
There's no hyper-text linking! Not entirely true. Because references to other man pages are in a standard format, it is trivial to compute references... there are perl scripts out there that turn troff(1)-formatted man pages into HTML with useful links to other man pages reliably and easily. It wouldn't be difficult to forego HTML completely, and simply rewrite the man(1) program to handle these links. In fact, with a slight change to the manner in which references were made, you could even specify sections of other man pages easily, since the sections are standard.
Man pages don't give useful information! This is an amalgation of a few complaints, actually - that man pages only discuss commands and APIs, for instance, that they don't include examples, etc. This is not relevant to man pages, but certain operating systems' man pages. If you look at OpenBSD, there are man pages that discuss general issues involved in VPNs(8), IPSec(4), and even general introductory information (afterboot(8)). Man pages suit this sort of topic treatment reasonable well, and lead to more centralized documentation (a real win!).
You can't print good books from man pages! OK, true enough. Info, DocBook, etc. are well-suited for writing general books intended to teach. However, Trying to use Info or DocBook documents as references is unpleasant, and involves a lot of poking around for just the link. They essentially serve a completely different purpose.
For Gnome, there's no reason to not rely upon something standard like man (or even info) over HTML, when man and info translate much better to HTML than vice versa.
How hard would it be to write a script to replace "man", in say, perl, and this script would perform the function of converting man pages into browsable HTML pages (using Lynx?) or automatically use Lynx if the page is already in HTML, or if the page is info based, convert that? Something like this should be possible.
That path seems to presuppose that the person didn't already use Linux or BSD, and that being a Karma Whore and hence getting to Karma Kapped is a necessary step. It ain't; I've never seen the high end of 30 karma, and I never tried to get past 10 (all I ever wanted was to be able to be lose karma, to stupid posts or metamoderation, without going negative).
It ignores the first moderation down; the poster will be indignant, that some stupid moderator lacked the intelligence to see the poster's comment for all its glory. Eventually, the poster gets used to the fact that the quality of the moderators is proportional to the quality of the posters, and that the worst moderators are almost as bad as the worst posters.
It also ignores the progression of a moderator,
who is necessarily a poster as well:
The poster gets moderator access the first time. This is frequently a magical experience, and each moderation up or down gets a lot of consideration.
The poster gets complacent about moderator access; moderation becomes as much a spur of the moment response in annoyance or agreement with another poster, as a well-reasoned consideration of the value of posts relative to what has been posted.
As a result, the moderator loses karma to metamoderation: this is frequently a nasty surprise, since your karma goes down without any kind of notice. The poster begins to wonder 'what did I moderate wrong?' and begins to constantly second-guess moderation.
The poster realizes that the quality of the meta-moderators are also proportional to the quality of the posters, and so the quality of the meta-moderation can only be marginally better than the quality of the posts.
The poster decides to stop moderating, because to moderate is to lay your Karma bare before the idiots of Slashdot in an untraceable way.
The poster goes back to moderation, finally realizing that gaining or losing Slashdot Karma is largely irrelevant to life, and that good moderation helps to improve the quality of Slashdot -- that is, the better the posters moderated up, the better quality of the moderators and meta-moderators, and hence the better quality of the entire system.
It's hard to sort out what "the right thing to do" is, when the other parties aren't doing it. The right thing for SSHCS to do, for instance, is to consistently enforce or not enforce this trademark.
Fighting the use of trademarks to selectively target competition is a right thing to do. Fighting the involvement of trademarks in what should be standard software on every platform is a right thing to do. Right things to do are based upon merit, and not the familiarity of the names involved.
Being grateful to Tatu Ylonen for the work he's done that has benefitted the community, is also a right thing to do; I've already personally thanked him, and I plan on doing the other right things I listed above, as well.
I think SSHCS's claims have no standing, and their decision to ``defend their trademark'' against only a single product sheds a poor light on Tatu Ylonen.
Nonetheless, the letter is much, much friendlier than what I've seen in similar cases -- i.e., cease and desist yesterday.
IMO, it looks like SSHCS is following good and proper form as they do this entirely questionable act:-/
Slashdot Mirror
This seems factually incorrect. They've given back code to FreeBSD. While it's certainly true that Apple isn't "all open-source, all the time," that's different from the claims made in the article. Where they've taken BSD code, they've given back code.
Some of what the author said is true, but not under the guise he presents it. It's FUD.
Yes exactly. There are two essential rules when it comes to do-it-yourself convergence versus convergence-in-a-box. One is, as you mentioned, reliability and upgradability - one box means one horribly expensive part to replace if something goes wrong. Component cards oppose the 'in a box' concept - you're not supposed to have to much around inside this box, are you?
The other issue is quality. The quality of components will always have the potential to be higher - partially because someone designing a component doesn't have to trade quality in this part for quality in some other part, and partially because, well, the market for a component that just plays CDs can't be subdued by a poor CD player with a pretty good tape player attached. Also partially because you can't get away with no-name (or bad-name) parts the same way - in a shelf stereo, nobody notices prima facie the fact that the CD part was made by child labor in China; not so with a CD component - you're buying a CD component made by child labor in China, or you're not.
To think that an 'in-a-box' system can have precisely the featureset that you want it to have is contrary to the experience of years and years in the PC industry - that a pre-built system may be good enough, but it's never cutting edge, optimal, or right for every circumstance.
That's exactly the sort of note I'd like to see a teacher snatch and ask the student to read... somehow I doubt the 'goofing off instead of getting an education' argument would work too well.
Sadly, the only year I played chess via notes in high school, the teacher for the period in which I had a willing opponent was largely uninterested in catching us pass notes.
Well, that was assumed :) My point was that saying "OS X stole from NeXTStep" is ridiculous, and that "NeXTStep stole from MacOS" only slightly less so. Actually, I think that Apple should have at least acknowledged what they got from Xerox, and likewise MS should acknowledge that their pretty new interface is pretty dated as well. But that would be "off message" for both of them, who both claim to be the sole creators of the wares they're hawking.
What it comes down to is that BSDi is Telenet Systems plus some change and Windriver is BSDi plus some change. Or, put another way, if Telenet Systems had changed its name to iXsystems, and Wind River had directly acquired BSDI, we would be at pretty much the same point.
Who is CEO of the company that produced OS X? Steve Jobs. Who was the CEO of the company that produced NeXTstep? Steve Jobs. Who was the CEO of the company that produced MacOS? Steve Jobs. The only possible 'theft' that might have occured is when Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple and started NeXT, and mimicked the interface - but who here would really fault him since he started a new company trying to do the exact same thing he tried to do when he and Woz started the first company?
Either you've got waaay more debt than I do, or you're estimating your financial needs incorrectly. I have a pretty decent amount of debt (of all sorts - student loans for 5 years of expensive college, bank loans, credit, regular bills, money owed to friends, and I'm largely supporting my fiance), and I'm not making that much since I work for a university. Things still work out pretty well financially - I have some stress from it, just enough to keep me on my toes.
So, my advice? If you're going into IT of any sort, don't sweat the money. You'll probably make enough money to handle the debt and have a life, even if you won't be able to afford a new sports car immediately. Decide what you actually want to do, and how you want to approach that.
For that matter, keep in mind that, as I recall, a lot of student debt can be held off if you go to grad school, and a Master's or doctorate in CS leads to a lot of different kinds of careers than a BS (not necessarily better, but different).
Most of all, my advice would be: don't sweat the money too much. Look at what you want, and what choices now can help you get there. If there's something about a company that makes you feel they'll hold you back from what you want, hesitate only a little before deciding to ignore them.
Yeah, unless you need a PDA today. They're incredibly useful regardless of whether they have an upgrade path. I would still be happy with my two year old Palm III if it hadn't gotten busted.
OK, it's great that Windows supports open-on-hover (or whatever you want to call it). Just out of curiosity, since when? I'm pretty sure not since '95... :)
However, Ctrl-X/C/V sounds wrong. Let me repeat my question: can you paste a list of filenames to a text entry box? Can you accidentally stop the operation by copying something else to the clipboard (what happens if you cut the files to move them, and then copy something else to the clipboard? oops)? I haven't got a Windows system available on which to test this, but if it doesn't do both, it does it wrong. OS/2, incidentally, has had a superior form of this feature(1) for some time.
There's also the problem of Windows having no idea whether it wants Ctrl-X,C,V or Shift-Insert,Ctrl-Insert, and Ctrl-Delete, and this feature only reenforces that.
1. It doesn't purport to use the clipboard, it gives you visual feedback (the pointer changes) when something is 'picked up,' and it doesn't interfere with other operations (like regular cut and paste).
Hey, I didn't say it was perfect!
My point was that you can download files and they will be assigned reasonable file types without user intervention.Over all, I think that MacOS's 4-char type and 4-char creator attributes suck, but at least it's not tying the file type to the file name like Windows.
I'm saddened that such a stupid troll got moderated up. I've got several friends who also use OS/2, and I've got several co-workers (at a Unix shop) who also use Macs, not counting all of my student friends who benefit from Macs. I only know of a couple of people who use BeOS, and in fact, I think that BeOS overall isn't very interesting - but they nailed the filesystem, and the file typing system.
The point is - and I'm saying this for the benefit of moderators who think that you are an insightful person - that it's not important how successful these other operating systems are/were. If we're not copying Windows (OK, Gnome is trying), then we're either striking out on our own without any idea of UI design, or we're trying to copy from other people with good UI design skills - like the MacOS, OS/2, and BeOS developers.
Putting them in the clipboard is a horrible semantic idea. Can you paste the list of filenames into a text window?
OS/2 and MacOS both do this better: in OS/2, you can put a drag 'on hold' and go do other things (without holding your mouse button down), and then later go ahead and drop. In MacOS, you can hover a drag over a folder and it will open after a second, letting you navigate without ever clicking on a folder
Bzzzt, sorry. OS/2, MacOS, and BeOS all solved the 'file extension/file type' problem a long time ago, without the MS hack that leads to 'x.jpg.vbs' exploits in MIME clients. MacOS has the most consistent way of doing things (specifically for downloaded files), but they all handle it.
OS/2 (and possibly BeOS) also support command-line querying and setting of file types, and Unix has had the file 'magic' command for some time to identify file types based on their contents.
No, the throughput is not as high as possible. It's better, sure, and it will take a load away from the CPU, which might be sufficient, but not the best. The problem is that each IDE drive can still only service one request at a time; thus, optimally, you can handle n requests for n drives. Since the article specified input and output, you can't do a simple RAID1 system to handle n reads of any data. Instead he has to go with striping, which would lead to having n reads and/or writes distributed across n drives if each request is for data on a different drive.
My advice? If you can afford new hardware, buy the best you can afford; the Arena Array may be sufficient, and it will certainly be better, but you'll need to do some resarch - how many concurrent connections, how are the file requests and uploads distributed, etc. - to see if you can expect an IDE array to fix your problems.
It boils down to either a) the problem has to be solved, and you'll just have to do whatever it takes to fix it (and I don't think you'll fix it with software), or b) you'd like to fix it but it's not that important. In the case of b), hdparm might be your best bet, as well as making sure you have a NIC that doesn't need a lot of hand-holding by the CPU.
Just for posterity, I'll respond: locking is a problem for the BSDs , not server-side.
Unfortunately, I spent my last mod point on some yahoo who didn't read a linked article... I wish I'd saved it for this.
Errr... I think you mean asymmetric encryption. Symmetric algorithms use the same key for encryption and decryption, so there is no difference between sender and recipient.
Errrr, info2html, not inf2html. I got the names confused, since I use OS/2 :)
Similarly, there's a CGI script called inf2html that converts GNU info documentation into HTML. Between the two, you can have a single semi-unified portal to all standard documentation available online. Not sure of where it canonically is located, but I bet google can tell you.
Man pages are extremely adequate for almost every purpose, and most software. There are a few reasonable criticisms, and a lot of unreasonable ones... here goes:
For Gnome, there's no reason to not rely upon something standard like man (or even info) over HTML, when man and info translate much better to HTML than vice versa.
You mean like man.cgi that all of the BSD projects use?
That path seems to presuppose that the person didn't already use Linux or BSD, and that being a Karma Whore and hence getting to Karma Kapped is a necessary step. It ain't; I've never seen the high end of 30 karma, and I never tried to get past 10 (all I ever wanted was to be able to be lose karma, to stupid posts or metamoderation, without going negative).
It ignores the first moderation down; the poster will be indignant, that some stupid moderator lacked the intelligence to see the poster's comment for all its glory. Eventually, the poster gets used to the fact that the quality of the moderators is proportional to the quality of the posters, and that the worst moderators are almost as bad as the worst posters.
It also ignores the progression of a moderator, who is necessarily a poster as well:
Actually, when I read the letter, I saw
Are you just trying to stir up the flames?It's hard to sort out what "the right thing to do" is, when the other parties aren't doing it. The right thing for SSHCS to do, for instance, is to consistently enforce or not enforce this trademark.
Fighting the use of trademarks to selectively target competition is a right thing to do. Fighting the involvement of trademarks in what should be standard software on every platform is a right thing to do. Right things to do are based upon merit, and not the familiarity of the names involved.
Being grateful to Tatu Ylonen for the work he's done that has benefitted the community, is also a right thing to do; I've already personally thanked him, and I plan on doing the other right things I listed above, as well.
I think SSHCS's claims have no standing, and their decision to ``defend their trademark'' against only a single product sheds a poor light on Tatu Ylonen.
Nonetheless, the letter is much, much friendlier than what I've seen in similar cases -- i.e., cease and desist yesterday.
IMO, it looks like SSHCS is following good and proper form as they do this entirely questionable act :-/