You may call XNU whatever you wish but the fact remains: - it's not a monolithic kernel by design - it has Mach in it and Mach is some sort of microkernel. Maybe it does not reach "today's" standards of being called a microkernel but it was a very popular microkernel before.
So maybe the things running on top of Mach ( http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Co nceptual/KernelProgramming/index.html ) are conceptually "different" from what the services of microkernel should be, and they do share indeed the address space, but this is very very very different from the architecture of a traditional monolithic kernel such as Linux
This guy ( http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/intel.html ) recently tested some stats software on his Mac running OS X and Linux, and found out that indeed MacOS X had performance issues, very likely due to the architecture of the kernel.
There's even a rumor that says that since Avie Tevanian left Apple ( http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/5553/ ), some guys are now working for removing the Mach microkernel and migrate to a full BSD kernel in the next release of the operating system.
And now my personal touch. I agree with Linus when he says that having small components doing simple parts on their sides and putting them together with pipes and so on, is somehow the UNIX way and is attracting (too lazy to find the quote). However as he demonstrates later, distributed computing is not easy, and there's also the boundray crossing issue. I guess he has a point when he says this is a problem for performance and the difficulty on designing the system... So if performance is what you indeed expect from a kernel, then you must stop dreaming of a clean-centralized good software architecture like those we have for our high oo-oriented software.
But the truth is that, although developing a monolithic kernel is an easier task to do from scratch than a microkernel, I guess the entry ticket (learning curve) for a monolithic kernel developes is more expensive. The main reason being, "things ARE NOT separated". Anyone, anywhere in the kernel could be modifying the state of that thing, for non obvious reason, even if there's a comment that says "please don't do that" or it shoulld not be the case etc.... Microkernel can obviouisly provide some kind of protection and introspections to these things, but have always hurt performances to do so.
Now it has everything to do on what you expect. Linux has many many many developpers and obviously can afford having a monolithic design that changes every now and then and you may prefer a kernel that goes fast than one whose code is clearn, well organized and easy to read. But the corrolary of that observation is that for the same reasons, grep, cat, cut, find, sort, or whatever unix tools you use with pipes and redirection are similarly a cleaner but YET INEFFICIANT design. However, it's been proven (with time) to be a good idea..
I think things that are "low level" will be bound to have a poor spagehtti software architecture because performance matters and the code is smaller.. but the higher level you go, the less performance matters, and the more code maintenance and evolutivity matters... Everything is a tradeof: good design practice depends on the type of problems your software tackles.
That said, it does not mean no progress can be made in kernel developments. Linux already uses a somewhat different C lang
same thing, but you guys are gonna use it anyway:) bet in 20 years all US cars have it...
unless there's still a war in iraq, and in that case u'd better learn how to walk or be ready to pay $6 a gallon for the pseudo-replacement of "petrole"
Well, this would be the end of the world wide interoperability and it'd make it easier for some local governments to apply free speech restrictions. Today only China has enough money to do that effectively.
Personally, I'm French but I do live in Germany and work for an American company. I use 99% of the time Internet in English and browse sites which are mainly hosted in the US. I mostly use internet for work related topics, and English is the lingua franca for programmers.
But for most of personal queries too I use American sites... I would not think about using German of French in a query, unless searching for something specific to the country, because usually the information i'd find would be more accurate in English. Movie reviews, wikipedia, technical stuff, etc... I also appreciate the news from American sites which give me a very different perspective of the news than the one I'd get from German or French medias. This was particularly interesting when you have such things as the Iraq war going on, and you can make your own opinion about what is going by accessing the propaganda of both sides:)
I think one way or another, most foreigners who regularly use Internet will end up using an American site or a localized version of it... You guys would have a lot of $$$ to lose if you lost this quasi-monopoly on the Net. I really think it's in the interest of the US to keep control over this kind of stuff and somehow I trust more Americans on that than Europeans technocrates...
I know these exploits/proof of concepts and mentioned them. As I said, there's NO TRULY HARMFUL VIRUS ON MAC. This is just propaganda from these security/anti virus companies that cannot justify the need for their products on Mac. As I said, it does not mean MacOS X is secure, but it's a mix of broken backward compatibility, small market share, few people able to program this and lack of interest. So we're safe for a long while my friends:)
These two beasts u show are exploits/proof of concepts which are merely classified as worms by Symantec with LOW risk (= no risk)
- the second is a real joke It's just an old exploit. Nothing harmful at all. You need BLUTOOTH activated, be in the range, and have an old not up to date macos x version (with apple software update it's hard). It just replicates, that's all it'll ever do:) Wooow.. am scared. I think I have never ever used blutooth on my laptop, and all my desktop macs don't have it, and the bug is patched on all my machines thanks to security updates:)
- the first one is a proof of concept but buggy! which means it's slightly harmful but it was not designed to be. To be infected the user must nicely unpack an archive and launch the program. It's a bit like sending a "rm -Rf" script to a Linux friend and tell him he can see Monica Lewinsky naked in Ascii-Art if he starts this:).... Then it hooks up on the user's InputManagers, if you're lucky and have mac os X 10.4 (will fail with all other versions) tries to infect 4 applications which are writable (by default/Application needs root rights to be writable, so on a brand new mac it fails). It's buggy, so it fails and prevent the application to launch in practise, but does not trash it (it's possible to restore normal behavior). The only successful way it has to propagate is to use iChat (I know no mac user around me who uses it.. lolz.. but ok, it's pretty common i imagine being there by default). Your contact must accept, uncompress and launch the crap to be infected too (and have a mac!!). And even that, does not always work because of another bug, the receiver might get a corrupted version sometimes. And did I mention it only works on ppc machines and not the new iMacs, mac mini and macbook pro which run on x86?
it's interesting to see that the second stuff could be improved and customized to do very nasty stuff. But no one even tried to.:) In addition, as long as it will require the use to nicely open it, it will probably fails to propagate because 99% of computer in this world run Windows
As I said, Macintoh users are ingorant of these things. So far there's been no threat. And these two exploits are unlikely to change anything. Install MacOS X out of the box and let it run a few days, there's hardly a chance u got infected by anything... I remember not so long ago reading an article that says the average time ur windows XP SP1 gets trashed: it is 20 mins.
Sure, the SP2 made a lot of progress (by simply disabling stuff no one used by default wowooo.. ). It was 2004. That same year I remember seing an exploit which made root escalation on Mac. It was not promoted by virus software editors therefore no one talked about it even here on slashdot. But i was pretty shocked to gain root access on a machine easily. I also remember in those days people talking about disguising an application with a document icon. I think there was even a proof of concept but unlike "oompa" it did not replicate. Truth is, that thing has been around for eons, but no-one really ever used to produce some malware code, so it remained unpatched for a while.
And the day it becomes a problem?? Well Apple will make the finder says smth like "hey this application has never been launched before. you sure u wanna run this?". Duh it h
I'm not saying that MacOS X is a super secure system. But the truth is, despite all the fuss we have heard about Mac OS X lately, so far there IS NO VIRUS OR SPYWARE known for Mac. How's that compared to the gazzilion of Windows?
There are a few exploits that necessitate either SSH or physical access to the machine. Bad:( And proof of concept viruses which no one has even bothered to re-use to build up something really nasty... Maybe the system is not Fort KNOX, but so far, Mac users do not have to run anti-virus or anti-spyware, and they're right to be ignorant there's NO SUCH THINGS. It does not exist.
- Virus and spyware makers do not care about the 1% Mac marketshare. good:) - They do not have the expertise - Those who have usually like Macs, so don't develop such nasty things - Apple breaks the backward compatibility very often (there used to be REAL viruses before on MacOS... but they can't work on current hardware/OS) Today it's the ppc->x86 change. Yesterday it was OS 9 -> OS X, or 68k -> ppc - Components are usually not dependent with one another in silly ways (see IE): you don't browse your files with a webbrowser, you don't d/l your security updates with a web browser, there's no such things as custom toolbars or activex in ur default browser.. - All crappy default stuff are disabled by default - No one runs MacOS X in "root" mode, unless a geek (it's hard to activate, those who do it know what to do).. So it's hard for one user to fuck up another's users documents and stuff, or for a virus/spyware to trash the whole machine:)
so yeah. I feel pretty safe with a Mac in the hands of my mom who knows nothing about security. If she had a Wintel PC I'd have to install all those crappy anti-virus / anti-software that eat CPU cycles and HD spins, and cost money, and even like that, I'm sure my mom's computer would go in such a nasty state i'd have to re-install it from scratch...
macos x itself is far from being perfect. it is probably not that secure, but the risk for the guenine user is today "non existant"
as for the servers, they do run the same software as their Linux/UNIX counterparts. So it's no more no less secure:)
There are a few, but these two in particular are very bad:
"Newer machines can only execute new code from emulation called Rosetta" = "Newer machines can only execute new code or old code through an emulation engine called Rosetta"
"or use techniques to lure the user to do that, and as long as it does not try to access a virus." = "or use techniques to lure the user to do that, and as long as it does not try to access low level features a virus would need."
Because Apple breaks software backward compatibility very often, and is actually very criticized fot that by software publishers. On the other hand, it makes it hard for a virus malware to be able to work on many Mac generations.
For instance, the architecture of a computer and the OS has changed too much since the times of Windows 95 (MacOS 7.5 / 8), for even legacy software bought in those days to run sucessfully on today's latest iMac or MacBook Pro. Even if these soft do not need to access hardware or anything low level at all...
There are four different platforms that have been called mac in the last 10 years - the new. x86 with MacOS X. OS X is based on a Mach microkernel + BSD low level APIs + Carbon/Cocoa for GUI toolkit. Code written for this OS will not be able to target older Macs. - the most current. MacOS X on ppc. Newer machines can only execute new code from emulation called Rosetta. And Rosetta having some limitations, a good virus writer should be cautious enough or his code will not run on the newer x86 machines. Running as an application is ok, accessing low level system resources would require 2 codes (1 for x86 another for PPC) - the old MacOS 8, 9 on ppc. It's the original MacOS series. Not UNIX based. Different APIs thank MacOS X for all low level management (and network) Applications would work on MacOS X ppc (not x86) only through a compatibility box. More or less it's a sort of vmware/virtual pc with better integration. There's no emulation. Viruses written for MacOS 8/9 are very unlikely to be able spread on OS X - the old MacOS 7, 8, 9 on 68k. (I think it's better than calling them Moto, coz the first ppc were made by Motorola too). Although the API and the system did not change, ppc machines running MacOS 8/9 are only able to run 68k code through an emulation layer (yeah.. same story again). It means, viruses would not be able to access low resources and spread on the two platforms.
As you can see Apple is changing its platform every 4/5 years, breaking backward compatibility. A "malware" written for a newer version would never work on an older version. And it's usually hard for this type of software to propagate from an "older" version to a "newer"... Unless this is a mere "application" more or less asking the user to click on it, or use techniques to lure the user to do that, and as long as it does not try to access a virus.
Now, there are many things that could potentially be exploited to write a virus on Mac. Either that'd be a buffer overrun or smth that could be correct by a fix, or some flaw in the design of an API. Microsoft would probably try to patchwork around the API not to break the compatibility in that case. But i'm damn sure Apple would just trash away the old API:)
x86 = pentium processors and co ppc = powerpc. either from IBM or motorala in the old days 68k = the old motoral 68000 series processors. 68030 / 68040 for the perio that interest us.
In France for instance it is the case:)
At the same moment the government is about to vote the controversial DADVSI law (that some nickname not without reason the "Vivendi-Unversal Studio" law).
One of the goal of this law is to suppress the right French ppl have had so far to make a private copy for personal usage of DVDs (they don't suppress for audio CDs though... go figure..:). So far you have had the right to transfer the videos from the DVD you bought into your iPod (even though you have to hack the DVD protection for that), make a DVD copy of Nemo (in case the kids destroy the original), etc... This also has legitimated the royalites the movie industry gets from the tax on storage devices (CDs, DVDs, Hard Disks, USB keys, iPods, etc... ) And of course they wish to remove the possibility to make copies but WITHOUT SUPRESSING THE TAX AND THE ROYALTIES to the movie industry!!
This law was planned to be voted by night on Dec 23rd (yeah, no joke!!), but some congressmen rebelled and added amendments to legalize p2p instead and drag media and public attention to this "hidden" law, planned to be voted in secret on christmas eve.
I don't think the law will hellp their decreasing profits (on the contrary), but it will harm our economy for sure...
Now... maybe if they made it attractive to "buy" things.. like no fucking DRM, cheaper fees, ppl would actually buy more and they'd make money out of it:) Who would bother dowbload a movie of bad quality on a P2P network and wait days or weeks, while you could buy it for 5 bucks, of better quality, without DRM, and with a faster d/l ?!!
But apprently the trend is to double the fee for the next generation DVDs.... they don't get it yet... go on like that and you will file for bankrucpcy and jail half your customers:)
Well, I have always been reluctant to criticize XUL because Firefox runs very decently, even on MacOS X. There are some GUI glitches on OS X, but roughly, it performs better than.. let's say QT apps in general.
Although XUL looks like a flawn design, it works decently enough to run Firefox despite the hacks you describe... And it has also a great advantage: plugins written for Firefox are platform-less. You would not care about this if you use windows or linux x86, but I let you imagine what a relief it is for Firefox users on minority platforms (linux ppc, macos X, etc.. )... You don't have to spend your time re-compiling things. Everything works without hassle... It's a great feature for (a minority of) end users!
Now, javascript is certainly not the only interpreted language in the world. It may have made sense to use it back then, because the browser had to have a Javascript interpretor built-in anyway...
but... if you consider adding another language interpretor in your browser is not a problem and intend to replace XUL, what approach would u choose? What would you choose to have develop a platform independent plugin system which can handle native GUI and all? Just curious... I don't have the feeling there are out-of-the-box OSS solutions like XUL. Am I wrong?
First. The experiment. My old 6300 which is a lot slower than your 8600, and it is a well known flaw designed machine from Apple (maybe the worst Mac ever released) and it uses an old IDE disk and you should have a SCSI. However it sure does not take me 20 mins to copy a mere 17Mb folder.
- this depend on the nb of files and sizes of the files. Copying thousands of 1kb files or one big file is totally different, and this is not OS or FS related. Even if you are in the first case, this is too slow...
- your disk may be physically damaged
- your disk may be fragmented and especially the files u try to copy
- your system is polluted with a lot of crap (extensions?)
Second. What's the point?
- MacOS X does not share a single line of code with what is running your old computer.
- If you blame Apple's hardware then OSX86 is good news. You can buy a PC and run OS X on it.
- If you blame the OS, then why comment at all? You're obviously happy with whatever system u're running (Windows?) and this issue does not interest you.
Third. Productivity.
- There are hundred of points of comparisons for choosing which OS is the most productive. It depends on your usage and what you do, what may be true for you may not be for others.. for very different reasons. I do not want to criticize, but if the most important thing for your productivity is file copy speed, then maybe you should consider using a system like Linux with RaiserFS volumes (or smth else... ) that should be much faster than NT and NTFS on your old machine.
- Multitask. This was a major weakness of pre OS-X MacOS systems. But I think the issue has been solved for quite some time now. On OS X even with old hardware, you could copy your stuff use BBEdit and Firefox with no problem.
Correct me if I am wrong but don't windows NT let you start a copy even though there is not enough space on your destination drive? That is one of the things I personally consider counter-productive.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what you mean by Micro Kernel and Monolithic.
True, the kernel of MacOS/X - Darwin, aka XNU, for performance reasons run the Mach and BSD layer both in superuser space to minimize the lattency.
Maybe this is what you call a hybrid kernel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel
You may call XNU whatever you wish but the fact remains:
- it's not a monolithic kernel by design
- it has Mach in it and Mach is some sort of microkernel. Maybe it does not reach "today's" standards of being called a microkernel but it was a very popular microkernel before.
So maybe the things running on top of Mach ( http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Co nceptual/KernelProgramming/index.html ) are conceptually "different" from what the services of microkernel should be, and they do share indeed the address space, but this is very very very different from the architecture of a traditional monolithic kernel such as Linux
This guy ( http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/intel.html ) recently tested some stats software on his Mac running OS X and Linux, and found out that indeed MacOS X had performance issues, very likely due to the architecture of the kernel.
There's even a rumor that says that since Avie Tevanian left Apple ( http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/5553/ ), some guys are now working for removing the Mach microkernel and migrate to a full BSD kernel in the next release of the operating system.
And now my personal touch. I agree with Linus when he says that having small components doing simple parts on their sides and putting them together with pipes and so on, is somehow the UNIX way and is attracting (too lazy to find the quote). However as he demonstrates later, distributed computing is not easy, and there's also the boundray crossing issue. I guess he has a point when he says this is a problem for performance and the difficulty on designing the system... So if performance is what you indeed expect from a kernel, then you must stop dreaming of a clean-centralized good software architecture like those we have for our high oo-oriented software.
But the truth is that, although developing a monolithic kernel is an easier task to do from scratch than a microkernel, I guess the entry ticket (learning curve) for a monolithic kernel developes is more expensive. The main reason being, "things ARE NOT separated". Anyone, anywhere in the kernel could be modifying the state of that thing, for non obvious reason, even if there's a comment that says "please don't do that" or it shoulld not be the case etc.... Microkernel can obviouisly provide some kind of protection and introspections to these things, but have always hurt performances to do so.
Now it has everything to do on what you expect. Linux has many many many developpers and obviously can afford having a monolithic design that changes every now and then and you may prefer a kernel that goes fast than one whose code is clearn, well organized and easy to read. But the corrolary of that observation is that for the same reasons, grep, cat, cut, find, sort, or whatever unix tools you use with pipes and redirection are similarly a cleaner but YET INEFFICIANT design. However, it's been proven (with time) to be a good idea..
I think things that are "low level" will be bound to have a poor spagehtti software architecture because performance matters and the code is smaller.. but the higher level you go, the less performance matters, and the more code maintenance and evolutivity matters... Everything is a tradeof: good design practice depends on the type of problems your software tackles.
That said, it does not mean no progress can be made in kernel developments. Linux already uses a somewhat different C lang
at least with Safari and my usual Pith Helmet config... I browsed a bit and I haven't seen an ad :) and not a warning either
so they can have all the policies they want but if they cannot inforce them I don't think if it'll change anything for them.
what's so hard with a manual gear too?
:) bet in 20 years all US cars have it...
same thing, but you guys are gonna use it anyway
unless there's still a war in iraq, and in that case u'd better learn how to walk or be ready to pay $6 a gallon for the pseudo-replacement of "petrole"
because I don't know what they do :)
Well, this would be the end of the world wide interoperability and it'd make it easier for some local governments to apply free speech restrictions. Today only China has enough money to do that effectively.
:)
:)
Personally, I'm French but I do live in Germany and work for an American company. I use 99% of the time Internet in English and browse sites which are mainly hosted in the US. I mostly use internet for work related topics, and English is the lingua franca for programmers.
But for most of personal queries too I use American sites... I would not think about using German of French in a query, unless searching for something specific to the country, because usually the information i'd find would be more accurate in English. Movie reviews, wikipedia, technical stuff, etc... I also appreciate the news from American sites which give me a very different perspective of the news than the one I'd get from German or French medias. This was particularly interesting when you have such things as the Iraq war going on, and you can make your own opinion about what is going by accessing the propaganda of both sides
I think one way or another, most foreigners who regularly use Internet will end up using an American site or a localized version of it... You guys would have a lot of $$$ to lose if you lost this quasi-monopoly on the Net. I really think it's in the interest of the US to keep control over this kind of stuff and somehow I trust more Americans on that than Europeans technocrates...
I think in China they agree even more
I know these exploits/proof of concepts and mentioned them. As I said, there's NO TRULY HARMFUL VIRUS ON MAC. This is just propaganda from these security/anti virus companies that cannot justify the need for their products on Mac. As I said, it does not mean MacOS X is secure, but it's a mix of broken backward compatibility, small market share, few people able to program this and lack of interest. So we're safe for a long while my friends :)
:) Wooow.. am scared. I think I have never ever used blutooth on my laptop, and all my desktop macs don't have it, and the bug is patched on all my machines thanks to security updates :)
:).... Then it hooks up on the user's InputManagers, if you're lucky and have mac os X 10.4 (will fail with all other versions) tries to infect 4 applications which are writable (by default /Application needs root rights to be writable, so on a brand new mac it fails). It's buggy, so it fails and prevent the application to launch in practise, but does not trash it (it's possible to restore normal behavior). The only successful way it has to propagate is to use iChat (I know no mac user around me who uses it.. lolz.. but ok, it's pretty common i imagine being there by default). Your contact must accept, uncompress and launch the crap to be infected too (and have a mac!!). And even that, does not always work because of another bug, the receiver might get a corrupted version sometimes. And did I mention it only works on ppc machines and not the new iMacs, mac mini and macbook pro which run on x86?
:) In addition, as long as it will require the use to nicely open it, it will probably fails to propagate because 99% of computer in this world run Windows
These two beasts u show are exploits/proof of concepts which are merely classified as worms by Symantec with LOW risk (= no risk)
- the second is a real joke It's just an old exploit. Nothing harmful at all. You need BLUTOOTH activated, be in the range, and have an old not up to date macos x version (with apple software update it's hard). It just replicates, that's all it'll ever do
- the first one is a proof of concept but buggy! which means it's slightly harmful but it was not designed to be. To be infected the user must nicely unpack an archive and launch the program. It's a bit like sending a "rm -Rf" script to a Linux friend and tell him he can see Monica Lewinsky naked in Ascii-Art if he starts this
it's interesting to see that the second stuff could be improved and customized to do very nasty stuff. But no one even tried to.
As I said, Macintoh users are ingorant of these things. So far there's been no threat. And these two exploits are unlikely to change anything. Install MacOS X out of the box and let it run a few days, there's hardly a chance u got infected by anything... I remember not so long ago reading an article that says the average time ur windows XP SP1 gets trashed: it is 20 mins.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/19/infected_i n20_minutes/
Sure, the SP2 made a lot of progress (by simply disabling stuff no one used by default wowooo.. ). It was 2004. That same year I remember seing an exploit which made root escalation on Mac. It was not promoted by virus software editors therefore no one talked about it even here on slashdot. But i was pretty shocked to gain root access on a machine easily. I also remember in those days people talking about disguising an application with a document icon. I think there was even a proof of concept but unlike "oompa" it did not replicate. Truth is, that thing has been around for eons, but no-one really ever used to produce some malware code, so it remained unpatched for a while.
And the day it becomes a problem?? Well Apple will make the finder says smth like "hey this application has never been launched before. you sure u wanna run this?". Duh it h
I'm not saying that MacOS X is a super secure system. But the truth is, despite all the fuss we have heard about Mac OS X lately, so far there IS NO VIRUS OR SPYWARE known for Mac. How's that compared to the gazzilion of Windows?
:( And proof of concept viruses which no one has even bothered to re-use to build up something really nasty... Maybe the system is not Fort KNOX, but so far, Mac users do not have to run anti-virus or anti-spyware, and they're right to be ignorant there's NO SUCH THINGS. It does not exist.
:) :)
:)
There are a few exploits that necessitate either SSH or physical access to the machine. Bad
- Virus and spyware makers do not care about the 1% Mac marketshare. good
- They do not have the expertise
- Those who have usually like Macs, so don't develop such nasty things
- Apple breaks the backward compatibility very often (there used to be REAL viruses before on MacOS... but they can't work on current hardware/OS) Today it's the ppc->x86 change. Yesterday it was OS 9 -> OS X, or 68k -> ppc
- Components are usually not dependent with one another in silly ways (see IE): you don't browse your files with a webbrowser, you don't d/l your security updates with a web browser, there's no such things as custom toolbars or activex in ur default browser..
- All crappy default stuff are disabled by default
- No one runs MacOS X in "root" mode, unless a geek (it's hard to activate, those who do it know what to do).. So it's hard for one user to fuck up another's users documents and stuff, or for a virus/spyware to trash the whole machine
so yeah. I feel pretty safe with a Mac in the hands of my mom who knows nothing about security. If she had a Wintel PC I'd have to install all those crappy anti-virus / anti-software that eat CPU cycles and HD spins, and cost money, and even like that, I'm sure my mom's computer would go in such a nasty state i'd have to re-install it from scratch...
macos x itself is far from being perfect. it is probably not that secure, but the risk for the guenine user is today "non existant"
as for the servers, they do run the same software as their Linux/UNIX counterparts. So it's no more no less secure
There are a few, but these two in particular are very bad:
"Newer machines can only execute new code from emulation called Rosetta" = "Newer machines can only execute new code or old code through an emulation engine called Rosetta"
"or use techniques to lure the user to do that, and as long as it does not try to access a virus." = "or use techniques to lure the user to do that, and as long as it does not try to access low level features a virus would need."
Because Apple breaks software backward compatibility very often, and is actually very criticized fot that by software publishers. On the other hand, it makes it hard for a virus malware to be able to work on many Mac generations.
:)
For instance, the architecture of a computer and the OS has changed too much since the times of Windows 95 (MacOS 7.5 / 8), for even legacy software bought in those days to run sucessfully on today's latest iMac or MacBook Pro. Even if these soft do not need to access hardware or anything low level at all...
There are four different platforms that have been called mac in the last 10 years
- the new. x86 with MacOS X. OS X is based on a Mach microkernel + BSD low level APIs + Carbon/Cocoa for GUI toolkit. Code written for this OS will not be able to target older Macs.
- the most current. MacOS X on ppc. Newer machines can only execute new code from emulation called Rosetta. And Rosetta having some limitations, a good virus writer should be cautious enough or his code will not run on the newer x86 machines. Running as an application is ok, accessing low level system resources would require 2 codes (1 for x86 another for PPC)
- the old MacOS 8, 9 on ppc. It's the original MacOS series. Not UNIX based. Different APIs thank MacOS X for all low level management (and network) Applications would work on MacOS X ppc (not x86) only through a compatibility box. More or less it's a sort of vmware/virtual pc with better integration. There's no emulation. Viruses written for MacOS 8/9 are very unlikely to be able spread on OS X
- the old MacOS 7, 8, 9 on 68k. (I think it's better than calling them Moto, coz the first ppc were made by Motorola too). Although the API and the system did not change, ppc machines running MacOS 8/9 are only able to run 68k code through an emulation layer (yeah.. same story again). It means, viruses would not be able to access low resources and spread on the two platforms.
As you can see Apple is changing its platform every 4/5 years, breaking backward compatibility. A "malware" written for a newer version would never work on an older version. And it's usually hard for this type of software to propagate from an "older" version to a "newer"... Unless this is a mere "application" more or less asking the user to click on it, or use techniques to lure the user to do that, and as long as it does not try to access a virus.
Now, there are many things that could potentially be exploited to write a virus on Mac. Either that'd be a buffer overrun or smth that could be correct by a fix, or some flaw in the design of an API. Microsoft would probably try to patchwork around the API not to break the compatibility in that case. But i'm damn sure Apple would just trash away the old API
x86 = pentium processors and co
ppc = powerpc. either from IBM or motorala in the old days
68k = the old motoral 68000 series processors. 68030 / 68040 for the perio that interest us.
i'm sure high-res pirated DivX will work fine ont this equiment...
:)
when will they deter ppl from piracy by providing a seducing legal order? One more step in the wrong direction..
bah who cares.... Won't by HD till their DRM has been cracked, so that i hack a DVD i bought to play it on my TV
In France for instance it is the case :)
At the same moment the government is about to vote the controversial DADVSI law (that some nickname not without reason the "Vivendi-Unversal Studio" law).
One of the goal of this law is to suppress the right French ppl have had so far to make a private copy for personal usage of DVDs (they don't suppress for audio CDs though... go figure.. :). So far you have had the right to transfer the videos from the DVD you bought into your iPod (even though you have to hack the DVD protection for that), make a DVD copy of Nemo (in case the kids destroy the original), etc... This also has legitimated the royalites the movie industry gets from the tax on storage devices (CDs, DVDs, Hard Disks, USB keys, iPods, etc... ) And of course they wish to remove the possibility to make copies but WITHOUT SUPRESSING THE TAX AND THE ROYALTIES to the movie industry!!
This law was planned to be voted by night on Dec 23rd (yeah, no joke!!), but some congressmen rebelled and added amendments to legalize p2p instead and drag media and public attention to this "hidden" law, planned to be voted in secret on christmas eve.
I don't think the law will hellp their decreasing profits (on the contrary), but it will harm our economy for sure...
Now... maybe if they made it attractive to "buy" things.. like no fucking DRM, cheaper fees, ppl would actually buy more and they'd make money out of it :) Who would bother dowbload a movie of bad quality on a P2P network and wait days or weeks, while you could buy it for 5 bucks, of better quality, without DRM, and with a faster d/l ?!!
But apprently the trend is to double the fee for the next generation DVDs.... they don't get it yet... go on like that and you will file for bankrucpcy and jail half your customers :)
Well, I have always been reluctant to criticize XUL because Firefox runs very decently, even on MacOS X. There are some GUI glitches on OS X, but roughly, it performs better than.. let's say QT apps in general.
Although XUL looks like a flawn design, it works decently enough to run Firefox despite the hacks you describe... And it has also a great advantage: plugins written for Firefox are platform-less. You would not care about this if you use windows or linux x86, but I let you imagine what a relief it is for Firefox users on minority platforms (linux ppc, macos X, etc.. )... You don't have to spend your time re-compiling things. Everything works without hassle... It's a great feature for (a minority of) end users!
Now, javascript is certainly not the only interpreted language in the world. It may have made sense to use it back then, because the browser had to have a Javascript interpretor built-in anyway...
but... if you consider adding another language interpretor in your browser is not a problem and intend to replace XUL, what approach would u choose? What would you choose to have develop a platform independent plugin system which can handle native GUI and all? Just curious... I don't have the feeling there are out-of-the-box OSS solutions like XUL. Am I wrong?
What has this comment to do at all with the news?
First. The experiment. My old 6300 which is a lot slower than your 8600, and it is a well known flaw designed machine from Apple (maybe the worst Mac ever released) and it uses an old IDE disk and you should have a SCSI. However it sure does not take me 20 mins to copy a mere 17Mb folder.
- this depend on the nb of files and sizes of the files. Copying thousands of 1kb files or one big file is totally different, and this is not OS or FS related. Even if you are in the first case, this is too slow...
- your disk may be physically damaged
- your disk may be fragmented and especially the files u try to copy
- your system is polluted with a lot of crap (extensions?)
Second. What's the point?
- MacOS X does not share a single line of code with what is running your old computer.
- If you blame Apple's hardware then OSX86 is good news. You can buy a PC and run OS X on it.
- If you blame the OS, then why comment at all? You're obviously happy with whatever system u're running (Windows?) and this issue does not interest you.
Third. Productivity.
- There are hundred of points of comparisons for choosing which OS is the most productive. It depends on your usage and what you do, what may be true for you may not be for others.. for very different reasons. I do not want to criticize, but if the most important thing for your productivity is file copy speed, then maybe you should consider using a system like Linux with RaiserFS volumes (or smth else... ) that should be much faster than NT and NTFS on your old machine.
- Multitask. This was a major weakness of pre OS-X MacOS systems. But I think the issue has been solved for quite some time now. On OS X even with old hardware, you could copy your stuff use BBEdit and Firefox with no problem.
Correct me if I am wrong but don't windows NT let you start a copy even though there is not enough space on your destination drive? That is one of the things I personally consider counter-productive.