Now, we add a whole new method of content rendering. We can't even impliment the main standards properly.
We can do so, a trained monkey could almost do so, it's quite easy to do... the problem is instead of trained monkeys we have so-called web designers that refuse to learn the basic facts about HTML. I don't know if you're one of them or not, but your post is a perfect example of the ignorant arrogance I'm talking about.
How do we plan to ensure that an audio interface can successfully read a website, as well?
By using HTML. Very simple. If your website is readable with lynx, it's readable for the blind. If it's not, you need to learn HTML and fix it.
Keep in mind that this is not what the web was originally designed to handle.
No, this is exactly what the web was originally designed to handle. Ever wonder why it's so difficult to control page layout exactly with HTML? It's because HTML is a content language, not a layout language. It was designed from the beginning to leave 'layout' decisions up to the browser, for precisely the reason that it was designed to be accessible via every disparate 'viewing' device imaginable, explicitely including teletypes and voice-readers!
Obviously these massive engineering companies don't think that any DRM can't be broken/circumvented ever. That's why their goal is to make it as inconvenient as possible to do so. Would you go through the hassle of finding a high-res printer, scan the image, and save it as a jpg everytime that someone wanted a copy? Moreover, would a casual user? No. That's the goal.
Doesn't matter at all, one person makes a good copy and then it's just a normal.jpg file, you can copy it and share it forever.
I used Linux for most of the period from 96 to now, though I haven't for a few months now. For my relatively mundane unix needs OS 10 may not be perfect, but it's good enough, and it's a lot handier than dual booting Linux/Windows. So anyway, I do know where you're coming from firsthand, but I've got to point something out. What you have on Linux is a lot of freedom. If you really must have a consistent system, you can do it with X - just pick one toolkit and make sure every app you run uses it. Of course, that narrows the applications you have to choose from quite a bit, but if that consistency was more important than the variety of applications then you would do it.
I managed to get a fairly consistent interface on Linux, far from perfect, but close enough it didn't drive me utterly crazy... it required in my case four custom themes, one for WindowMaker, one for GTK, one for Gnome, one for KDE... I could have made it more consistent by dropping apps, but that was the trade-off I made. Mozilla... well if you search a bit you can probably dig up some nasty flames I've posted on the subject... XUL is a wrongheaded monstrosity, I agree on all that. That said, I'm using Mozilla right now. Because I'd rather have it than IE, even though IE is native and it is not, for other reasons. I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't lose sight of the fact that, even though the interface crappiness is a bad thing, no one is forcing you to use these things, you've weighed the good and the bad points at least subconsciously and decided the good outweighs the bad... else you would not be using them, right?
But, developers who spend weeks making their apps themable instead of making them easier to use in the first place should really take a moment to think about their goals. Themes (within free software at least) are mostly a bandaid measure for bad UI design and poor cooperation.
Ironically, I really do agree with you there. Themable apps are a pretty horrible idea. That said, themes for the whole system are a whole different ball of wax.
Apples efforts against theming quite piss this basically happy G4 owner off, and I'm not the only one. They want a consistent interface on Mac, and I can certainly understand that, but it's still my machine, they got their money, and if I loan it to anyone I'll create a new user for them anyway. Apples concern with it really shouldn't go any further than making sure that new users start with the default theme. And it's not just themes they are doing this with, countless other minor utilities keep getting broken every time they upgrade OSX, and it seems most of it is deliberate. None of which improves goodwill towards Apple among the users who like these utilities, and none of which makes any sense except from exactly the sort of snooty, we-know-better-shut-up-and-eat-your-spam attitude that Apple should be avoiding like the plague. Think different - but only the same different we have prepared for you, don't you dare tweak anything. Anyway, read the article, it is really worth it, it explains some of the actual changes which I'm not going to duplicate.
I think what's going on is a backlash by certain sections within Apple against the expanded user freedom implied with the command line and the Unix base. They're overcompensating against the perceived 'complexity' introduced (even though they've done a good job of making sure the user doesn't even need to know about it, which is where they should have stopped) and so now they are clamping down on personalisation and customisability traits that have long been Apple hallmarks. A very very poor reaction. I certainly hope whoever is behind it gets straightened out or sacked soon, because I really do love these new Macs, and I don't want to see Apple shoot itself in the foot like this anymore.
I'm not convinced that the effort needed to enforce this kind of fault tolerance would be reasonable - on one hand you could tolerate failures of the Unix personality, on the other this would add complexity to both the kernel (to be able to restart demons/servers) and to the servers (they would need to be able to restore their state at restart) - IMHO, for a single OS machine, it sounds overkill.
Which is a very good example of why Linux got the mindshare among developers. The Hurd takes an approach that many think is 'too correct' whereas Linux is more associated with pragmatism. However:
One case where I think such an architecture makes a lot of sense is if you implement many virtualised OSes on one single machine. For instance you would have n logical servers that share one micro-kernel - in this case, if one of the virtual servers fails, the others are not affected.
Exactly the point. This is why I say that Hurd has incredible potential. Think of it from a kernel hacking standpoint for a moment - no more needing a separate developers box, once the core is worked out and stable all personality aspects can be hacked and tested at will, even on a shared machine, without special permissions...
The main purported advantage to microkernels are stability and flexibility, along with all the other good stuff that comes from modularity of course. A microkernel can run different personalities which present what we generally think of as a kernel interface to the outside, as user processors. So for instance the same box, the same microkernel, could be running a Windows personality for one user, a Mac for another, *nix for a third, all with effective root priveliges if need be, but without actually being able to do any damage outside their virtual sandbox... from a developers standpoint it's an incredible potential, I really can't do it justice but you should read this.
The potential here has never been exploited, unfortunately. Every existing microkernel AFAIK has wound up ditching the microkernel design at some point down the road, aiming to produce a particular personality (whether win32, the near-BSD personality of Darwin, etc.) and integrating key features of that personality into kernel space for performance reasons, essentially nullifying the whole microkernel idea. The HURD is the exception, and yes it's been a long time making, and it's still not ready yet, but if it ever does hit primetime it will be a very interesting system.
As to the performance hits, you're right that they are there, however there is a long history of some very smart people working on that problem, and it's gotten a LOT better. I think the current performance winner among microkernels is L4 and you can run a Linux personality on it without seeing a noticeable performance loss over running real Linux on the same processor - that's some very nice optimisation. There has been talk of porting the HURD to run on L4 instead of GNU Mach at some point, I think actually some people working on the problem areas, but for the moment there is no need - HURD is still very much in the developers only phase, it's not for production systems yet so performance isn't critical.
You aren't the first to think that was odd. I've been interested in that question myself for awhile. I'm no authority, but I'll pass on what I've learned. First Matthias' post is fairly accurate with one major exception. He wrote:
Software enginiering. Even if you compile everything in the same address space, it makes sense to separate functionality. This way, you keep a nice design, but do not pay the performance price for context switches.
Right so far, although I'm sure that Linus, among others, disagrees with the notion that you can't do even nicer design in a monolithic kernel if you pay attention.
BTW, what Apple has done with Mach is basically the same way MS went with NT (yes I know this week they call it XP, but I don't feel any obligation to obey the dictates of their marketing department so I'll keep calling it NT thanks,) starting with a microkernel but then moving certain systems back into kernelspace for performance reasons.
Also separated address spaces do not reduce the chances of a kernel crash. Even if the BSD layer was in its own address space, a crash would still bring down the Mach kernel, as part of the BSD layer handles disks and so swap devices.
Here's where I think he's wrong. What he's describing here is how it works in Darwin (and NT) yes, but only because they moved those systems back into kernel space. But the way it works on a proper microkernel system (like the HURD) doesn't just run these things in a separate address space but at a different privilege level, so instead of crashing the kernel you simply crash a daemon and have to restart it. This does mean drawing the lines a little differently than they have, of course.
You wrote:
Darwin is Mach and the BSD kernel merged together. They both live in kernel space. So why are they using Mach? I dunno.
OK, my best guess is that it's simply a historical relic. When Jobs started work on NeXT, it was damn near universal opinion in CS that Microkernels were the way to go, so that's the way he had it done. NeXT, of course, went bankrupt, and was bought at fire-sale prices by Apple, which has now reworked that system into OS X. At no point along the way did it seem clear to the development team that there was any compelling reason to build a new core - the performance problems are minimised by violating the 'microkernel ethic' and moving the personality into kernel space, without actually rewriting the kernel from scratch. So there you go... probably not the way they would write the thing if they had to start over from scratch, but they don't, and it's good enough. Software development is like organic evolution in that way, even though people usually misquote 'survival of the fittest' what Darwin (as in Charles Darwin) actually said was 'survivor of the fit' - it doesn't matter if something's optimal, as long as it's good enough.
[x] Trashcan support [X] Easy to use Windowing system - WindowMaker - quietly delivering the usability other noisier projects only aspire to for years. [X] Standard software install system - *cough* it says *standard* - Tarballs [X] Easy to use Windows filesharing - KDE, Samba [X] Easy support for video files and DVD - see http://mplayerhq.hu/ [X] Desktop company support - Legions of answers here, a competitive marketplace is good for the consumer.
Anyway, reading the article, which starts out 'I guess you may call me a "mouse freak", and I suppose that I am one indeed' and continues through such moisty-gushy phrases as 'I still wasn't satisfied' 'My "mouse dream" has been finally fulfilled' and 'You can't imagine how good I feel right now' - it's hard NOT to draw the obvious conclusion. It looks like the gerbils now have competition, as a new breed of rodent fetishist comes out of the closet.
What you don't seem to understand is that it's no more work for them to verify that a system has been patched and/or had IIS removed than it is to verify that it's not 2k/NT. Enforcement is exactly the same either way, a simple portscan will suffice to identify compliant/noncompliant nodes in either case. So why do they demand the elimination of certain OS instead of removing/patching vulnerable components? I'm betting on incompetence. This particular outfit is pretty well known for that already.
...AND you'll have to have a better plan than that to beat the packeteer.
It can be beaten, and I'm sure there are one or two kids in those dorms smart enough to figure it out, but it's not nearly as easy as what you are thinking.
Anyway, it's not censorship at all, did you even read the article? People running filesharing software on the LAN have effectively DDOSd their peers (pun intended) on campuses worldwide, it's a real issue. UCI has taken a very balanced approach to the problem, unlike a number of other Universities - they are NOT prohibiting filesharing, they are NOT trying to punish people that use a lot of bandwidth - instead they have introduced a rather sophisticated piece of hardware that is configured to allow filesharing, but not to allow it to compete for all the bandwidth, just around a third or a quarter of it, with the rest reserved for other uses.
I applaud them. And no, I'm not going to tell you how to get around the packeteer. If you figure it out, I urge you to keep your mouth shut too. If more than one or two of these kids figure it out, UCI will be forced to take more draconian measures, and I don't want that to happen, do you?
I will point out that one way to work with the Packeteer, rather than against it, is to organise Gnucleus Lan/Overpeer etc. - remember that your bandwidth from point to point on the LAN is NOT being restricted, just the incoming and outgoing traffic, so if you set the clients up so that they only go outside of the LAN when necessary you'll get better performance.
I agree this is the best thing they could have done, given the situation. What's really nice is that they are so upfront about what they are doing... I can see how to bypass the bugger right off, can you?
What they've done isn't so much to limit bandwidth for p2p, as to place an IQ test in the way of actually using it... now I know as you read this a little light is going off in your head, you grok what I am saying? Good. Now shut up about it, that's right, don't post it. Those that need to know will figure it out, but if you post it for the rest then they'll have to change their system again and that won't be any fun for anyone. So zip it.;)
Gah, I didn't catch that until you pointed it out. I remember that fool, he used to spam slashdot fairly often, he has a grudge on his shoulder the size of texas over the GPL. I was going to send the author of the story a nice note to correct his inaccurate statement on that subject, but in his case it's obviously not worth it - this guy made up his mind a long time ago and he's not about to let the facts confuse him *sigh* I really wonder about people like that.
Download and run Adaware and it will remove all said offending files.
It works pretty well on windows machines, I've used it before. It does not, however, come in a mac version. Maybe you missed the fact that we were discussing the mac version? Freewire is windows only so far as prepared packages go too, although being a java app I could probably get it running if I cared, but...
Mldonkey is GPL, no garbage like that thrown in, and I like the edonkey network a lot better anyway, it tends toward verified packages with published hashes rather than this mess of misnamed trash I seem to find most of the time on Gnutella derivatives. Unfortunately mldonkey is not ready for Jaguar, but that should change any day now...
An AC saying it's windows only with no documentation doesn't exactly satisfy me... I tried it out a few weeks back and didn't see any evidence of abuse, but then I wasn't looking for it, silly me I thought Limewire were the good guys. Grrr. I like Mldonkey a lot better anyway, but now I'm wondering if I may have gotten some bugs piggybacked on the Limewire client that I'm not even using. If anyone knows what to look for it would be appreciated...
"XML (Extended Markup Language) invisibly marks up a list of executives' names in a PowerPoint slide..."
Who needs 'extensible' now when the future will bring us the Extended Markup Language!;-) Maybe it's second gen XML?
Nah, it's just a sign that the people who write this crap don't know their arse from a hole in the ground. Don't pretend you expected any different... *yawn*
Indeed, I know the type. Sometimes it's tough to defend free speech, they always find the most most indefensible assholes to crack down on first just for that reason.
Still, the principle is more important than the losers de jeur...
BTW, it would be real nice if libertyboard had a recover password link... or if it does, if it were easier to find. It's been a long time, but isn't there an email association already existing? Got out of the habit of reading the board and damned if I can remember my password... not even sure I remember my username at this point...
You don't seem to have grasped the point you were replying to. Yes, they can change the specs as they wish, yes, we understand that they market the box to sell games... none of that is responsive in the least to the post you were supposedly replying to, however. The point he made is that none of this has anything to do with security - the term is being misused.
Well, that seems to be their domain name, and originally, you couldn't have non-ASCII chars in domain names (and even now, it seems like it's a huge hassle and nobody does it).
Yes, but I didn't mean in the domain name, but the rest of the text, they still leave it out... I would have thought they would use it in main text, as the Hungarians do (even if they reverse it) and as they do in fact do in a minority of cases I found when I searched it in more depth. *shrug* Thanks for the dictionary link.
Ah, okay... I thought you just meant that you needed to be able to type foreign characters, but keep the familiar US English layout for the majority of your typing...
Well that is what I want to do, essentially. It's just a matter of how is best to do it. Doing it in the same way that I'm used to doing it, and in the way that it is likely to work on other computers that I might borrow from time to time, is greatly preferable to learning a whole new layout that won't work on most other peoples boxes...
...rather than wanting to duplicate the Windows US-International layout. In that case, hopefully the Technote will help... but I think it's a bit unfair to list the lack of a Windows-specific keyboard layout as a bad point against OSX:)
I really don't think so. Apple is explicitely courting Windows people to switch, after all... and, like it or not (I don't) those windows computers are the ones most often found as publically available machines, the ones that are most likely to be facing you when you need to work on someone elses computer... and typing is a physical skill, it requires a substantial investment of time to learn a new keymap. For all those reasons, I think it would make good sense for Apple to provide such a keymap on their computers.
Nobody cares about Icelandic;) I find it strange that ISO 8859-1 included ð and , but left out oe and OE, since the latter's used in French, which is a much bigger Western European language than Icelandic.
I doubt it has anything to do with French or Icelandic. Look instead at old and middle English and it makes perfect sense.
Grrr... note to self, don't experiment with character encoding in Mozilla while you have a large buffer in a form... it disappears.
Anyway I dont have time to type it all back in so Ill summarize quickly. I appreciate your correction, but Im still not sure its correct, as French is not my language and the sources Ive seen differ on the question - voila.fr for instance usually seems to not use an accent at all, voila.hu writes it with an acute accent throughout their text, but the screenshots show a grave accent on the magazine cover, etc. Two french language courses I found here quickly disagree, one uses acute, the other grave. I do think you're probably correct, but a definitive source would be nice.
I do know how to access these characters using the US and US Extended keymaps, but that's not a good solution to me. If I have to learn new keymaps anyway I'm better off learning to use the Swedish and Spanish ISO maps instead - with those there is some chance I will use them on other machines at least. But it would still be better for me to emulate the keymap I've been using for well over 10 years, which has served me well, which I can touchtype on at normal speed already, and which I can set any windows machine I might need to work on for a short time to in a few keystrokes. You see the logic there, yes?
Thanks for the technote pointer, it looks like just what I needed, I will digest it as soon as I have time.
Is odd that there is no Ð or yes - I wonder if those characters will show properly or not when I post - but not a huge issue for me fortunately.
Anyway, thanks for the post, and particularly the link...
One good reason would be because with the new Macs you can do all of that, with the possible exception of games depending on which ones you play, on one machine, without rebooting. Which is nice, particularly if that one machine is a TiBook you can take with you wherever you go.
On a TiBook myself, and I mostly agree with you. This thing is nice, but far from perfect. Roughly following your points, first those you list as positive:
Excellent battery life, plenty of processor power, very nice hardware.
OS X is a very usable GUI, I greatly prefer it to Windows, in comparison to the infinitely more customisable X system of course it loses some points - but gains some back as well, as the defaults work reasonably well whereas X requires extensive tweaking for me to be happy with it. I'm still pissed that they screwed up the placement of window control widgets - I can get NeXT and even classic Mac widget placement on X very easily, but on a Mac I'm stuck with this Windowsish mess? Why? Oh well, you can't get a mac style menu bar on X, and the more I use it the more I appreciate it, so I guess it evens out, and I'm happy in the main - at the same time if anyone reading this knows a way to hack the problem away please post.
The command line is very nice to have, yes, I can't live without it, which is the reason I never even considered getting a Mac for myself before OS 10. Previously I used Linux for "real work" and windows for compromise work-play, DOS sucks, but at least it's there... on classic Macs there is nothing. Which is a good thing when you're setting up a box for the computer-illiterate graphic artist down the hall, but not when considering something I'll actually use myself. But with OS 10, best of both worlds, nice GUI, plus a real unix command line, much better than DOS or cygwin either.
Now the ones you listed as bad:
The mouse... ugh, too true. Using the control key and the command key in conjunction with the mouse button, of course, is the workaround, but it's definately not as good as having a real mouse.
Though there are, as others have pointed out, third party applications to give you multiple desktops, they're all proprietary payware (if I'm wrong please correct me, I'd love to know) and it's inexcusable really for the OS to lack such basic functionality.
As another poster said, TiBooks have a screw you can use to fix this problem, it's located between F5 and F6, pretty sure the iBook has it too? The problem I'm having with the keyboard is how to goddamn remap it. I have a keymap set up just the way I want (spent a good bit of time editing it last night) in ~/Library/Keyboards and another copy of it merged into the main localized.rsrc file and all of the information I can find says either should work... but my keymap is still not available. This is my biggest problem with the bugger at the moment. I need to have strange characters like öåäñáóéíç etc. handy, this is not optional for me. Switching around to swedish, spanish, etc. keymaps that I am not really familiar with just doesn't cut it, it's a pain and time consuming. In Windows (god I hate to say anything good about Windows, but in this area it is very nice) you just choose US-International keymap and voilá! problem solved. In X it's not too hard to duplicate that keymap really, and once it's done it works like a charm. On this Mac, well it took hours to figure out where the keymaps were kept and what tools I needed to edit them (one tool to split the resource fork out, another to edit it, then the first again to merge the resource fork back) and then after all that work it just doesn't work! I could cry... again if you know what's going on here please do take this as a request to post some help... I've pretty much exhausted everything on the subject google knows about..
One more thing you didn't mention but needs to be said... Free Software! Yes, the OS isn't Free, which is sad, but it's quite a bit closer than the Windows box I still had to keep on before, and it's a hell of a lot easier to port *nix applications to. Which is good for the user, and good for Free Software too, more ports and more eyeballs.
Slashdot Mirror
We can do so, a trained monkey could almost do so, it's quite easy to do... the problem is instead of trained monkeys we have so-called web designers that refuse to learn the basic facts about HTML. I don't know if you're one of them or not, but your post is a perfect example of the ignorant arrogance I'm talking about.
By using HTML. Very simple. If your website is readable with lynx, it's readable for the blind. If it's not, you need to learn HTML and fix it.
No, this is exactly what the web was originally designed to handle. Ever wonder why it's so difficult to control page layout exactly with HTML? It's because HTML is a content language, not a layout language. It was designed from the beginning to leave 'layout' decisions up to the browser, for precisely the reason that it was designed to be accessible via every disparate 'viewing' device imaginable, explicitely including teletypes and voice-readers!
Here go educate yourself.
Doesn't matter at all, one person makes a good copy and then it's just a normal .jpg file, you can copy it and share it forever.
I used Linux for most of the period from 96 to now, though I haven't for a few months now. For my relatively mundane unix needs OS 10 may not be perfect, but it's good enough, and it's a lot handier than dual booting Linux/Windows. So anyway, I do know where you're coming from firsthand, but I've got to point something out. What you have on Linux is a lot of freedom. If you really must have a consistent system, you can do it with X - just pick one toolkit and make sure every app you run uses it. Of course, that narrows the applications you have to choose from quite a bit, but if that consistency was more important than the variety of applications then you would do it.
I managed to get a fairly consistent interface on Linux, far from perfect, but close enough it didn't drive me utterly crazy... it required in my case four custom themes, one for WindowMaker, one for GTK, one for Gnome, one for KDE... I could have made it more consistent by dropping apps, but that was the trade-off I made. Mozilla... well if you search a bit you can probably dig up some nasty flames I've posted on the subject... XUL is a wrongheaded monstrosity, I agree on all that. That said, I'm using Mozilla right now. Because I'd rather have it than IE, even though IE is native and it is not, for other reasons. I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't lose sight of the fact that, even though the interface crappiness is a bad thing, no one is forcing you to use these things, you've weighed the good and the bad points at least subconsciously and decided the good outweighs the bad... else you would not be using them, right?
Ironically, I really do agree with you there. Themable apps are a pretty horrible idea. That said, themes for the whole system are a whole different ball of wax.
Apples efforts against theming quite piss this basically happy G4 owner off, and I'm not the only one. They want a consistent interface on Mac, and I can certainly understand that, but it's still my machine, they got their money, and if I loan it to anyone I'll create a new user for them anyway. Apples concern with it really shouldn't go any further than making sure that new users start with the default theme. And it's not just themes they are doing this with, countless other minor utilities keep getting broken every time they upgrade OSX, and it seems most of it is deliberate. None of which improves goodwill towards Apple among the users who like these utilities, and none of which makes any sense except from exactly the sort of snooty, we-know-better-shut-up-and-eat-your-spam attitude that Apple should be avoiding like the plague. Think different - but only the same different we have prepared for you, don't you dare tweak anything. Anyway, read the article, it is really worth it, it explains some of the actual changes which I'm not going to duplicate.
I think what's going on is a backlash by certain sections within Apple against the expanded user freedom implied with the command line and the Unix base. They're overcompensating against the perceived 'complexity' introduced (even though they've done a good job of making sure the user doesn't even need to know about it, which is where they should have stopped) and so now they are clamping down on personalisation and customisability traits that have long been Apple hallmarks. A very very poor reaction. I certainly hope whoever is behind it gets straightened out or sacked soon, because I really do love these new Macs, and I don't want to see Apple shoot itself in the foot like this anymore.
Which is a very good example of why Linux got the mindshare among developers. The Hurd takes an approach that many think is 'too correct' whereas Linux is more associated with pragmatism. However:
Exactly the point. This is why I say that Hurd has incredible potential. Think of it from a kernel hacking standpoint for a moment - no more needing a separate developers box, once the core is worked out and stable all personality aspects can be hacked and tested at will, even on a shared machine, without special permissions...
The main purported advantage to microkernels are stability and flexibility, along with all the other good stuff that comes from modularity of course. A microkernel can run different personalities which present what we generally think of as a kernel interface to the outside, as user processors. So for instance the same box, the same microkernel, could be running a Windows personality for one user, a Mac for another, *nix for a third, all with effective root priveliges if need be, but without actually being able to do any damage outside their virtual sandbox... from a developers standpoint it's an incredible potential, I really can't do it justice but you should read this.
The potential here has never been exploited, unfortunately. Every existing microkernel AFAIK has wound up ditching the microkernel design at some point down the road, aiming to produce a particular personality (whether win32, the near-BSD personality of Darwin, etc.) and integrating key features of that personality into kernel space for performance reasons, essentially nullifying the whole microkernel idea. The HURD is the exception, and yes it's been a long time making, and it's still not ready yet, but if it ever does hit primetime it will be a very interesting system.
As to the performance hits, you're right that they are there, however there is a long history of some very smart people working on that problem, and it's gotten a LOT better. I think the current performance winner among microkernels is L4 and you can run a Linux personality on it without seeing a noticeable performance loss over running real Linux on the same processor - that's some very nice optimisation. There has been talk of porting the HURD to run on L4 instead of GNU Mach at some point, I think actually some people working on the problem areas, but for the moment there is no need - HURD is still very much in the developers only phase, it's not for production systems yet so performance isn't critical.
You aren't the first to think that was odd. I've been interested in that question myself for awhile. I'm no authority, but I'll pass on what I've learned. First Matthias' post is fairly accurate with one major exception. He wrote:
Right so far, although I'm sure that Linus, among others, disagrees with the notion that you can't do even nicer design in a monolithic kernel if you pay attention.
BTW, what Apple has done with Mach is basically the same way MS went with NT (yes I know this week they call it XP, but I don't feel any obligation to obey the dictates of their marketing department so I'll keep calling it NT thanks,) starting with a microkernel but then moving certain systems back into kernelspace for performance reasons.
Here's where I think he's wrong. What he's describing here is how it works in Darwin (and NT) yes, but only because they moved those systems back into kernel space. But the way it works on a proper microkernel system (like the HURD) doesn't just run these things in a separate address space but at a different privilege level, so instead of crashing the kernel you simply crash a daemon and have to restart it. This does mean drawing the lines a little differently than they have, of course.
You wrote:
OK, my best guess is that it's simply a historical relic. When Jobs started work on NeXT, it was damn near universal opinion in CS that Microkernels were the way to go, so that's the way he had it done. NeXT, of course, went bankrupt, and was bought at fire-sale prices by Apple, which has now reworked that system into OS X. At no point along the way did it seem clear to the development team that there was any compelling reason to build a new core - the performance problems are minimised by violating the 'microkernel ethic' and moving the personality into kernel space, without actually rewriting the kernel from scratch. So there you go... probably not the way they would write the thing if they had to start over from scratch, but they don't, and it's good enough. Software development is like organic evolution in that way, even though people usually misquote 'survival of the fittest' what Darwin (as in Charles Darwin) actually said was 'survivor of the fit' - it doesn't matter if something's optimal, as long as it's good enough.
[x] Trashcan support
[X] Easy to use Windowing system - WindowMaker - quietly delivering the usability other noisier projects only aspire to for years.
[X] Standard software install system - *cough* it says *standard* - Tarballs
[X] Easy to use Windows filesharing - KDE, Samba
[X] Easy support for video files and DVD - see http://mplayerhq.hu/
[X] Desktop company support - Legions of answers here, a competitive marketplace is good for the consumer.
Is there any other kind?
Anyway, reading the article, which starts out 'I guess you may call me a "mouse freak", and I suppose that I am one indeed' and continues through such moisty-gushy phrases as 'I still wasn't satisfied' 'My "mouse dream" has been finally fulfilled' and 'You can't imagine how good I feel right now' - it's hard NOT to draw the obvious conclusion. It looks like the gerbils now have competition, as a new breed of rodent fetishist comes out of the closet.
What you don't seem to understand is that it's no more work for them to verify that a system has been patched and/or had IIS removed than it is to verify that it's not 2k/NT. Enforcement is exactly the same either way, a simple portscan will suffice to identify compliant/noncompliant nodes in either case. So why do they demand the elimination of certain OS instead of removing/patching vulnerable components? I'm betting on incompetence. This particular outfit is pretty well known for that already.
...AND you'll have to have a better plan than that to beat the packeteer.
It can be beaten, and I'm sure there are one or two kids in those dorms smart enough to figure it out, but it's not nearly as easy as what you are thinking.
Anyway, it's not censorship at all, did you even read the article? People running filesharing software on the LAN have effectively DDOSd their peers (pun intended) on campuses worldwide, it's a real issue. UCI has taken a very balanced approach to the problem, unlike a number of other Universities - they are NOT prohibiting filesharing, they are NOT trying to punish people that use a lot of bandwidth - instead they have introduced a rather sophisticated piece of hardware that is configured to allow filesharing, but not to allow it to compete for all the bandwidth, just around a third or a quarter of it, with the rest reserved for other uses.
I applaud them. And no, I'm not going to tell you how to get around the packeteer. If you figure it out, I urge you to keep your mouth shut too. If more than one or two of these kids figure it out, UCI will be forced to take more draconian measures, and I don't want that to happen, do you?
I will point out that one way to work with the Packeteer, rather than against it, is to organise Gnucleus Lan/Overpeer etc. - remember that your bandwidth from point to point on the LAN is NOT being restricted, just the incoming and outgoing traffic, so if you set the clients up so that they only go outside of the LAN when necessary you'll get better performance.
I agree this is the best thing they could have done, given the situation. What's really nice is that they are so upfront about what they are doing... I can see how to bypass the bugger right off, can you?
What they've done isn't so much to limit bandwidth for p2p, as to place an IQ test in the way of actually using it... now I know as you read this a little light is going off in your head, you grok what I am saying? Good. Now shut up about it, that's right, don't post it. Those that need to know will figure it out, but if you post it for the rest then they'll have to change their system again and that won't be any fun for anyone. So zip it. ;)
Gah, I didn't catch that until you pointed it out. I remember that fool, he used to spam slashdot fairly often, he has a grudge on his shoulder the size of texas over the GPL. I was going to send the author of the story a nice note to correct his inaccurate statement on that subject, but in his case it's obviously not worth it - this guy made up his mind a long time ago and he's not about to let the facts confuse him *sigh* I really wonder about people like that.
It works pretty well on windows machines, I've used it before. It does not, however, come in a mac version. Maybe you missed the fact that we were discussing the mac version? Freewire is windows only so far as prepared packages go too, although being a java app I could probably get it running if I cared, but...
Mldonkey is GPL, no garbage like that thrown in, and I like the edonkey network a lot better anyway, it tends toward verified packages with published hashes rather than this mess of misnamed trash I seem to find most of the time on Gnutella derivatives. Unfortunately mldonkey is not ready for Jaguar, but that should change any day now...
It's a pity it doesn't work on Mac.
An AC saying it's windows only with no documentation doesn't exactly satisfy me... I tried it out a few weeks back and didn't see any evidence of abuse, but then I wasn't looking for it, silly me I thought Limewire were the good guys. Grrr. I like Mldonkey a lot better anyway, but now I'm wondering if I may have gotten some bugs piggybacked on the Limewire client that I'm not even using. If anyone knows what to look for it would be appreciated...
Nah, it's just a sign that the people who write this crap don't know their arse from a hole in the ground. Don't pretend you expected any different... *yawn*
Indeed, I know the type. Sometimes it's tough to defend free speech, they always find the most most indefensible assholes to crack down on first just for that reason.
Still, the principle is more important than the losers de jeur...
BTW, it would be real nice if libertyboard had a recover password link... or if it does, if it were easier to find. It's been a long time, but isn't there an email association already existing? Got out of the habit of reading the board and damned if I can remember my password... not even sure I remember my username at this point...
Darwin's been on x86 from the beginning. It's the higher level GUI systems that are PPC only.
I thought he was supposed to be one of the good guys... obviously I was wrong. What a moron.
You don't seem to have grasped the point you were replying to. Yes, they can change the specs as they wish, yes, we understand that they market the box to sell games... none of that is responsive in the least to the post you were supposedly replying to, however. The point he made is that none of this has anything to do with security - the term is being misused.
Yes, but I didn't mean in the domain name, but the rest of the text, they still leave it out... I would have thought they would use it in main text, as the Hungarians do (even if they reverse it) and as they do in fact do in a minority of cases I found when I searched it in more depth. *shrug* Thanks for the dictionary link.
Well that is what I want to do, essentially. It's just a matter of how is best to do it. Doing it in the same way that I'm used to doing it, and in the way that it is likely to work on other computers that I might borrow from time to time, is greatly preferable to learning a whole new layout that won't work on most other peoples boxes...
I really don't think so. Apple is explicitely courting Windows people to switch, after all... and, like it or not (I don't) those windows computers are the ones most often found as publically available machines, the ones that are most likely to be facing you when you need to work on someone elses computer... and typing is a physical skill, it requires a substantial investment of time to learn a new keymap. For all those reasons, I think it would make good sense for Apple to provide such a keymap on their computers.
I doubt it has anything to do with French or Icelandic. Look instead at old and middle English and it makes perfect sense.
Grrr... note to self, don't experiment with character encoding in Mozilla while you have a large buffer in a form... it disappears.
Anyway I dont have time to type it all back in so Ill summarize quickly. I appreciate your correction, but Im still not sure its correct, as French is not my language and the sources Ive seen differ on the question - voila.fr for instance usually seems to not use an accent at all, voila.hu writes it with an acute accent throughout their text, but the screenshots show a grave accent on the magazine cover, etc. Two french language courses I found here quickly disagree, one uses acute, the other grave. I do think you're probably correct, but a definitive source would be nice.
I do know how to access these characters using the US and US Extended keymaps, but that's not a good solution to me. If I have to learn new keymaps anyway I'm better off learning to use the Swedish and Spanish ISO maps instead - with those there is some chance I will use them on other machines at least. But it would still be better for me to emulate the keymap I've been using for well over 10 years, which has served me well, which I can touchtype on at normal speed already, and which I can set any windows machine I might need to work on for a short time to in a few keystrokes. You see the logic there, yes?
Thanks for the technote pointer, it looks like just what I needed, I will digest it as soon as I have time.
Is odd that there is no Ð or yes - I wonder if those characters will show properly or not when I post - but not a huge issue for me fortunately.
Anyway, thanks for the post, and particularly the link...
One good reason would be because with the new Macs you can do all of that, with the possible exception of games depending on which ones you play, on one machine, without rebooting. Which is nice, particularly if that one machine is a TiBook you can take with you wherever you go.
On a TiBook myself, and I mostly agree with you. This thing is nice, but far from perfect. Roughly following your points, first those you list as positive:
Now the ones you listed as bad:
One more thing you didn't mention but needs to be said... Free Software! Yes, the OS isn't Free, which is sad, but it's quite a bit closer than the Windows box I still had to keep on before, and it's a hell of a lot easier to port *nix applications to. Which is good for the user, and good for Free Software too, more ports and more eyeballs.