The kernel's based on Mach, but with a good number of components pulled in from FreeBSD as per my understanding, making it a unique hybrid. However, OSX as a whole is Unix-based, and while it's not entirely BSD, it pulls heavily from BSD code from the kernel down the the toolchain and has some NextStep/Apple proprietary tools loaded on top.
Perhaps "BSD Derivative" would be a better term, as it relies far more heavily on BSD code than the Linux distros I know of, or Windows.
Really? That's funny, when I boot my MacBook in single-user mode, I get the nice little UC Berkley Regents copyright notice. You know, the one that attributes most of the work behind the OSX Kernel to the BSD project like the BSD foundation requires.
And that's a bad thing? GPLv2 may not be as militant, but it's served us quite nicely for years now. I'd think many engineers would appreciate the "don't fix it if it ain't broke" mentality many groups are approaching GPLv3 with.
Oh Ubiquity, how we love you. I may need to install Ubuntu again, so I'll need to break out the chicken bones and juju baggie to appease that wonderful program soon.
This is an understandable concern, and in the older versions of Ubuntu, I felt the same.
However, in the newest version of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn, released in April), clicking on an unsupported filetype (such as an MP3, or AVI) brings up a dialogue box which A) Tells you that this codec is not supported, B) Offers to search for and install the codec for you.
I think this is the best trade-off, doesn't involve the CLI, and is something that my mum could easily work around. So actually, at this point, I don't see much reason for Automatix to exist.
I actually haven't heard that argument too often, but that could just be due to the circles we travel in. Most of the people I know, who have an opinion on the topic, at least, generally use mod-chips to get around silly region encoding. I've got a mate in Japan right now, and the poor guy opted out of buying a Wii at the last minute because he realised his US games wouldn't work on an Japanese Wii or vice versa.
From what I can tell, the hack requires cracking into the system with a utility, installing a cross-compiled SSH server into the iPhone, and then buttoning the whole thing back up.
So, presumably you can SSH in as root@ and get a Bash shell, and from what I've seen, the filesystem layout mirrors OSX. As far as HFS or Ext, I don't know, but I'm betting it's probably HFS+.
Really? Honestly I think the kernel dev here is referring more to the scheduler than anything else. As it stands the Linux kernel is designed to load balance like a server and not a desktop, so the response time suffers.
While I don't expect/want a ssh session on our production server to be snappy at the expense of serious number-crunching or web-serving, when I'm at home, I want my desktop to be snappy and do whatever I need to do now, even if that means my background processes need to chug a bit.
Exactly, even Flash handles domain locking these days. In Flash, you're usually only allowed to run scripts within the same domain as the website. Yes, for social websites like MySpace, that's not exactly fool-proof, but domain-level permissions would allow you to place sensitive items on a secure dev server, and only allow pages on the same server to access them.
Please, talk to a web designer and ask him/her how easy it is to preserve consistent formatting among many competing browsers despite the fact that they all use the same standards.
Hey, bonus question for your hypothetical designer: has Microsoft helped or hindered this situation?
Nothing too sinister really. Basically Apple just wants to make sure you're not calling it "CUPS" unless you're using the stable branch. If some twit forked CUPS and did some braindead things with it, understandably Apple wouldn't be less than thrilled about it sharing the same name with CUPS proper
This isn't horribly uncommon, but it is unpopular. Hell, look at the whole Firefox/Iceweasel debacle.
No kidding? Sounds familiar enough as I've just worked through that issue with a client. They had their payroll/timesheet program written from the ground up in ASP, and wanted to add a simple PHP based CMS to the mix. Well their IT guys couldn't figure out a way to make PHP and ASP play nice in IIS, so we just split their payroll/timesheet system off onto a subdomain and pointed the domain to a shiny new, dirt-cheap Red Hat server.
So here, I'll gladly admit that this is one of these cases where you need a Windows server. However, I will add to that statement that this is the first time I've encountered situation where a Windows server was mandatory in all the years I've been doing hosting/web design. So, while I don't claim to have all the answers, I'll say that the vast majority of cases can be handled rather easily.
Seriously, find me a bloody application that can only run on IIS. If we're talking hosting companies, I'd imagine that you'd be far more interested in something along the lines of ASP support, which is a fair argument, as many silly IT people tend to write critical, in-house web applications in VBScript, themselves.
I work for a small web design / hosting company and this is generally the issue we run into, and usually the workaround is to rewrite whatever functionality the silly IT person needs in PHP. This of course has the added benefit of being supported on every server platform in christendom, should they ever have to leave us. However, we rarely run into this issue these days, as vast majority of clients are running web apps built on PHP/MySQL.
Actually mbx is different from mbox. Similar stucture to mbox, but contains an index in the header so you're not wrestling with the entire file. While mbox file-locking is an ugly affair, mbx locking is supposedly more intelligent (though presumably still on a per-mailbox basis), and the performance is miles better. Still Maildir beats the pants off of both for high mail volume and reliability.
Anecdotally, however, we've yet to run into any data loss with mbx on our fairy high-traffic (but long in the tooth) mailserver. Still, thanks for the advice, which may help me nudge management into a new shinier mail server.;)
Aye, I've done that for the "Sent" folder, so I can actually keep track of conversations months after the fact. Trouble is... now Mail checks my "Sent Items" folder *and* "Sent". *sigh*
Off-topic (somewhat), but why is Dovecot better than Courier? We're using Courier on our mailserver at work, and my only complaint thus far has been the performance which was mostly solved by switching our users to MBX formatted inboxes.
Mail.app's IMAP support is rather spotty. You've got sod-all ability to subscribe/unsubscribe to different folders, and hell mend you if you want to save a draft, sent message, or trashed email on the server. The inability to choose a particular folder on the server for sent email is particularly crippling if you're using 4 different IMAP clients that get fussy about special folders.
As ar as slowdowns, that's largely because I can't tell Mail to stop polling folders by unscubscribing them. Threads be damned, stop having a peek at my.public_html!
But I do have to second your mailbox preference: Maildir is the bomb, yo.
not that synaptic is hard, but with synaptic you do need to know the name of what you want. With PC-BSD, you just pick from a menu of shiny icons and descriptions.
Actually I think Ubuntu already has a program that does this, labelled "Add Software" under the Applications menu. I'm not at my Feisty Desktop right now, but it is basically a Mom-friendly version of Synaptic, broken down into categories (such as "Office", "Games", "Web", etc.).
Oh sweet fancy moses, I'm having headaches just thinking about the Gentoo "slot" system. Mind you, my shiny new MacBook has a similar feature through Ports, so I'm not entirely rid of it. Personally I just want to apt-get php and go on my merry way.
Yeah, I don't know if it's intrinsic to xOrg or if it's an Ubuntu package issue but I've run into this issue a fair deal (usually on laptops), and it's crippling for a new user who's excited to try out the system.
Hell, that being said, the OS is quite good once you have it installed, but the installer needs some serious work.
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I definitely agree, and this looks like one of the situations where GPLv3 may be the more appropriate license.
The kernel's based on Mach, but with a good number of components pulled in from FreeBSD as per my understanding, making it a unique hybrid. However, OSX as a whole is Unix-based, and while it's not entirely BSD, it pulls heavily from BSD code from the kernel down the the toolchain and has some NextStep/Apple proprietary tools loaded on top.
Perhaps "BSD Derivative" would be a better term, as it relies far more heavily on BSD code than the Linux distros I know of, or Windows.
Really? That's funny, when I boot my MacBook in single-user mode, I get the nice little UC Berkley Regents copyright notice. You know, the one that attributes most of the work behind the OSX Kernel to the BSD project like the BSD foundation requires.
I mean, that whole Kernel thing isn't that big of a deal is it? I'm sure NT4 is practically uses FreeBSD under the hood. And, after all, look at the volumes of documentation on the differences between OSX and BSD.
Yeah, you're right, nobody ships BSD these days.
At least they've got those hobbyists though, right?
And that's a bad thing? GPLv2 may not be as militant, but it's served us quite nicely for years now. I'd think many engineers would appreciate the "don't fix it if it ain't broke" mentality many groups are approaching GPLv3 with.
Oh Ubiquity, how we love you. I may need to install Ubuntu again, so I'll need to break out the chicken bones and juju baggie to appease that wonderful program soon.
This is an understandable concern, and in the older versions of Ubuntu, I felt the same.
However, in the newest version of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn, released in April), clicking on an unsupported filetype (such as an MP3, or AVI) brings up a dialogue box which A) Tells you that this codec is not supported, B) Offers to search for and install the codec for you.
I think this is the best trade-off, doesn't involve the CLI, and is something that my mum could easily work around. So actually, at this point, I don't see much reason for Automatix to exist.
I actually haven't heard that argument too often, but that could just be due to the circles we travel in. Most of the people I know, who have an opinion on the topic, at least, generally use mod-chips to get around silly region encoding. I've got a mate in Japan right now, and the poor guy opted out of buying a Wii at the last minute because he realised his US games wouldn't work on an Japanese Wii or vice versa.
Bah, he's probably just on an iPhone!
From what I can tell, the hack requires cracking into the system with a utility, installing a cross-compiled SSH server into the iPhone, and then buttoning the whole thing back up.
So, presumably you can SSH in as root@ and get a Bash shell, and from what I've seen, the filesystem layout mirrors OSX. As far as HFS or Ext, I don't know, but I'm betting it's probably HFS+.
Really? Honestly I think the kernel dev here is referring more to the scheduler than anything else. As it stands the Linux kernel is designed to load balance like a server and not a desktop, so the response time suffers.
While I don't expect/want a ssh session on our production server to be snappy at the expense of serious number-crunching or web-serving, when I'm at home, I want my desktop to be snappy and do whatever I need to do now, even if that means my background processes need to chug a bit.
Exactly, even Flash handles domain locking these days. In Flash, you're usually only allowed to run scripts within the same domain as the website. Yes, for social websites like MySpace, that's not exactly fool-proof, but domain-level permissions would allow you to place sensitive items on a secure dev server, and only allow pages on the same server to access them.
Eeek! Use vim, and the colourisation will help a tonne.
Please, talk to a web designer and ask him/her how easy it is to preserve consistent formatting among many competing browsers despite the fact that they all use the same standards.
Hey, bonus question for your hypothetical designer: has Microsoft helped or hindered this situation?
Nothing too sinister really. Basically Apple just wants to make sure you're not calling it "CUPS" unless you're using the stable branch. If some twit forked CUPS and did some braindead things with it, understandably Apple wouldn't be less than thrilled about it sharing the same name with CUPS proper
This isn't horribly uncommon, but it is unpopular. Hell, look at the whole Firefox/Iceweasel debacle.
No kidding? Sounds familiar enough as I've just worked through that issue with a client. They had their payroll/timesheet program written from the ground up in ASP, and wanted to add a simple PHP based CMS to the mix. Well their IT guys couldn't figure out a way to make PHP and ASP play nice in IIS, so we just split their payroll/timesheet system off onto a subdomain and pointed the domain to a shiny new, dirt-cheap Red Hat server.
So here, I'll gladly admit that this is one of these cases where you need a Windows server. However, I will add to that statement that this is the first time I've encountered situation where a Windows server was mandatory in all the years I've been doing hosting/web design. So, while I don't claim to have all the answers, I'll say that the vast majority of cases can be handled rather easily.
Actually, it's pretty easy to enable the root user in OSX: you just assign it a password.
Technically it's there the whole time (hell it boots the system), but you're unable to log in as root unless root has a password.
Seriously, find me a bloody application that can only run on IIS. If we're talking hosting companies, I'd imagine that you'd be far more interested in something along the lines of ASP support, which is a fair argument, as many silly IT people tend to write critical, in-house web applications in VBScript, themselves.
I work for a small web design / hosting company and this is generally the issue we run into, and usually the workaround is to rewrite whatever functionality the silly IT person needs in PHP. This of course has the added benefit of being supported on every server platform in christendom, should they ever have to leave us. However, we rarely run into this issue these days, as vast majority of clients are running web apps built on PHP/MySQL.
Actually mbx is different from mbox. Similar stucture to mbox, but contains an index in the header so you're not wrestling with the entire file. While mbox file-locking is an ugly affair, mbx locking is supposedly more intelligent (though presumably still on a per-mailbox basis), and the performance is miles better. Still Maildir beats the pants off of both for high mail volume and reliability. Anecdotally, however, we've yet to run into any data loss with mbx on our fairy high-traffic (but long in the tooth) mailserver. Still, thanks for the advice, which may help me nudge management into a new shinier mail server. ;)
Aye, I've done that for the "Sent" folder, so I can actually keep track of conversations months after the fact. Trouble is... now Mail checks my "Sent Items" folder *and* "Sent". *sigh*
Off-topic (somewhat), but why is Dovecot better than Courier? We're using Courier on our mailserver at work, and my only complaint thus far has been the performance which was mostly solved by switching our users to MBX formatted inboxes.
Mail.app's IMAP support is rather spotty. You've got sod-all ability to subscribe/unsubscribe to different folders, and hell mend you if you want to save a draft, sent message, or trashed email on the server. The inability to choose a particular folder on the server for sent email is particularly crippling if you're using 4 different IMAP clients that get fussy about special folders.
As ar as slowdowns, that's largely because I can't tell Mail to stop polling folders by unscubscribing them. Threads be damned, stop having a peek at my .public_html!
But I do have to second your mailbox preference: Maildir is the bomb, yo.
Actually I think Ubuntu already has a program that does this, labelled "Add Software" under the Applications menu. I'm not at my Feisty Desktop right now, but it is basically a Mom-friendly version of Synaptic, broken down into categories (such as "Office", "Games", "Web", etc.).
Oh sweet fancy moses, I'm having headaches just thinking about the Gentoo "slot" system. Mind you, my shiny new MacBook has a similar feature through Ports, so I'm not entirely rid of it. Personally I just want to apt-get php and go on my merry way.
Yeah, I don't know if it's intrinsic to xOrg or if it's an Ubuntu package issue but I've run into this issue a fair deal (usually on laptops), and it's crippling for a new user who's excited to try out the system.
Hell, that being said, the OS is quite good once you have it installed, but the installer needs some serious work.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. It's been a long time since I lived in the UK ;)