It seems like every other Apple article posted to Slashdot draws comments from people who want Apple to give away their crown jewels, and have some kind of wacky idea as to why that would be a good idea for Apple.
Open source is really cool and all that jazz, but there are times when a company's best interests are served by keeping some code proprietary. You don't see Veritas giving away their volume manager, and you won't any time soon, either. Same deal with Apple.
Because there's more to an architecture than the CPU. Busses, booting strategies, chipsets, etc.
Not that anyone uses this... but there are CPUs that can run in little-endian or big-endian mode. So you could conceivably have two architectures with the same CPU that don't even have the same endianness.
Who exactly "had to pay an obscene amount of money" for Mac OS X?
Apple did not tell their mainstream users to purchase Mac OS X 10.0. I paid full price for it and knew exactly what I was getting.
Anyone who purchases a $129 product that even the vendor isn't recommending and doesn't do some research first is seriously out of touch with reality.
I'm glad Apple got the product out the door. I wanted to use it, and it was and is adequate for my purposes. It also kick-started development, which is important.
Speed and completeness issues aside, btw, there isn't a company on earth that could adequately test a new general-purpose GUI operating system, especially one as ambitious as Mac OS X. The conditions in the field vary too widely.
There are far more drug sellers and users than there are security geeks, but Federal and state governments have no problem with the idea of putting them all in prison. So I wouldn't be so cocky.
(Though security geeks are likely richer and whiter than drug offenders, on average, which will help.)
Your information about the rc scripts is wrong. Generic BSD doesn't have run levels at all. FreeBSD, for example, has a main rc script (/etc/rc) and a bunch of subsidiary scripts: rc.network, rc.firewall, rc.sysctl, etc. These don't correspond to runlevels but rather to general areas of functionality.
NetBSD and Darwin, like SysV-derived systems, have one script per service, but instead of encoding dependency information in the filenames, they put it in the files themselves. Each comes with a program that examines the files and determines what their order should be, based on the dependency information. This is a lot more flexible and intuitive than the SysV method, in my humble opinion.
FreeBSD developers have begun the work of converting FreeBSD to the NetBSD system, by the way.
OK, I'll flame. Actually, I just want to pick a nit: how can an ISO be 1 gigabyte when one can't fit a gigabyte on a CD? I don't think ISO images get bigger than 650 MB.
(Now of course someone will come along and prove me wrong, but that's ok.)
Indeed; I'm particularly excited by the SMP and threading stuff. If the mandatory access control stuff makes it in (and Robert Watson says he thinks it will), it will be interesting to see what people do with it. That technology could allow FreeBSD to be used in places where freeware has never been used before.
That is not so, as you will discover if you try to document it. Apple's "free" upgrade is going to cost me $20, and won't be available for download at all.
Darwin and OS X do not use BSD device drivers. They use a completely different driver architecture. Common wisdom on darwin-development is that it is easier to rewrite a BSD or Linux driver for Darwin than it is to port it.
I gave an Apple employee a ton of shit about this issue, and though he had a variety of ridiculous arguments as to how a $20 upgrade could be considered "free", he never denied that it was going to cost $20.
(So it's not free as in beer, nor is it free as in speech... maybe they meant it would be cholesterol-free.)
The cost of a software design failure would be higher if software design firms were liable for the consequences of failure of their software.
The implications of rules like that would be enormous, and I'm not sure that they would be beneficial. But I'm sure we've all wished for them at one time or another!
About a week ago, I saw the latest FreeBSD Development Report, compiled by Robert Watson. It's a simple report, including a paragraph or two on the state of all the major projects.
After reading the report, I decided to be a little bit scared of 5.0, because there were a lot of ambitious projects slated for inclusion therein.
This move strikes me as a recognition of a reality: it's going to take a lot of time to integrate all those projects and turn the result into something worthy of being called FreeBSD-RELEASE.
Re:Evolution of customer expectations and software
on
NYSE Goes To Linux
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· Score: 2
You make a good point, but people have been talking about the commoditization of the operating system for years. Microsoft knows it, that's why they're so interested in monopoly on web services -- they know that inertia is the only thing keeping their OS monopoly going.
BTW, when you say "correlations", I think you mean "corollaries".
Re:Not bad, but not as big as one might think.
on
NYSE Goes To Linux
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· Score: 2
Most shops aren't interested in buying OSs, they're interested in getting a job done. Notice that in this deal, there's an open-source OS, but all the interesting stuff is happening in proprietary software running on top.
Your basic small shop can't afford to have IBM develop a custom solution for them atop Linux. But they can afford SQL Server!
Red Hat understands this, and as much as I dislike their Linux distribution, I think they're the only Linux company that is really tackling Microsoft on the small-business front.
This article attacks David Boies in a footnote, saying that because he doesn't have an email address, he is "technologically illiterate".
I heard that Boies is learning-disabled and does not read -- instead he has aides read relevant documents to him. He has an eidetic memory and doesn't forget what's dictated to him. (Interestingly, for that reason, he asks his coworkers never to tell him anything that they're not absolutely sure of.) So the comment I referenced is rather insensitive.
That's what they'd have you believe. But although plenty of people made paper fortunes in dot-com IPOs, the Wall St. firms that underwrote them made crisp, folding millions on every one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like every other Apple article posted to Slashdot draws comments from people who want Apple to give away their crown jewels, and have some kind of wacky idea as to why that would be a good idea for Apple.
Open source is really cool and all that jazz, but there are times when a company's best interests are served by keeping some code proprietary. You don't see Veritas giving away their volume manager, and you won't any time soon, either. Same deal with Apple.
Because there's more to an architecture than the CPU. Busses, booting strategies, chipsets, etc.
... but there are CPUs that can run in little-endian or big-endian mode. So you could conceivably have two architectures with the same CPU that don't even have the same endianness.
Not that anyone uses this
Who exactly "had to pay an obscene amount of money" for Mac OS X?
Apple did not tell their mainstream users to purchase Mac OS X 10.0. I paid full price for it and knew exactly what I was getting.
Anyone who purchases a $129 product that even the vendor isn't recommending and doesn't do some research first is seriously out of touch with reality.
I'm glad Apple got the product out the door. I wanted to use it, and it was and is adequate for my purposes. It also kick-started development, which is important.
Speed and completeness issues aside, btw, there isn't a company on earth that could adequately test a new general-purpose GUI operating system, especially one as ambitious as Mac OS X. The conditions in the field vary too widely.
There are far more drug sellers and users than there are security geeks, but Federal and state governments have no problem with the idea of putting them all in prison. So I wouldn't be so cocky.
(Though security geeks are likely richer and whiter than drug offenders, on average, which will help.)
How about growing marijuana?
It's "Begin the Beguine".
A Beguine is apparently some sort of nun, but "Begin the Beguine" is an old tune by Cole Porter.
FreeBSD 5.0's SMP has borrowed ideas, but not code, from BSD/OS.
Your information about the rc scripts is wrong. Generic BSD doesn't have run levels at all. FreeBSD, for example, has a main rc script (/etc/rc) and a bunch of subsidiary scripts: rc.network, rc.firewall, rc.sysctl, etc. These don't correspond to runlevels but rather to general areas of functionality.
NetBSD and Darwin, like SysV-derived systems, have one script per service, but instead of encoding dependency information in the filenames, they put it in the files themselves. Each comes with a program that examines the files and determines what their order should be, based on the dependency information. This is a lot more flexible and intuitive than the SysV method, in my humble opinion.
FreeBSD developers have begun the work of converting FreeBSD to the NetBSD system, by the way.
OK, I'll flame. Actually, I just want to pick a nit: how can an ISO be 1 gigabyte when one can't fit a gigabyte on a CD? I don't think ISO images get bigger than 650 MB.
(Now of course someone will come along and prove me wrong, but that's ok.)
Indeed; I'm particularly excited by the SMP and threading stuff. If the mandatory access control stuff makes it in (and Robert Watson says he thinks it will), it will be interesting to see what people do with it. That technology could allow FreeBSD to be used in places where freeware has never been used before.
I think maybe 5.2 will be a milestone. 5.0 is likely to be a beta in all but name. This is not intended as a put-down of the FreeBSD Project, btw.
They were called Whistle and their flagship (only?) product was the InterJet.
They also contributed divert sockets and I believe they funded the development of soft updates.
I don't believe that is correct. Can you provide a pointer to any documentation?
That is not so, as you will discover if you try to document it. Apple's "free" upgrade is going to cost me $20, and won't be available for download at all.
Darwin and OS X do not use BSD device drivers. They use a completely different driver architecture. Common wisdom on darwin-development is that it is easier to rewrite a BSD or Linux driver for Darwin than it is to port it.
A deaf guy produced Rahsaan Roland Kirk's excellent album "The Inflated Tear."
(Kirk, btw, was blind.)
Well ... imagine being able to rapidly develop graphical applications that can be compiled for both Linux and Mac OS X.
There's potential there to unify two of the most important non-Microsoft software markets.
I gave an Apple employee a ton of shit about this issue, and though he had a variety of ridiculous arguments as to how a $20 upgrade could be considered "free", he never denied that it was going to cost $20.
... maybe they meant it would be cholesterol-free.)
(So it's not free as in beer, nor is it free as in speech
The cost of a software design failure would be higher if software design firms were liable for the consequences of failure of their software.
The implications of rules like that would be enormous, and I'm not sure that they would be beneficial. But I'm sure we've all wished for them at one time or another!
What about AppleScript?
About a week ago, I saw the latest FreeBSD Development Report, compiled by Robert Watson. It's a simple report, including a paragraph or two on the state of all the major projects.
After reading the report, I decided to be a little bit scared of 5.0, because there were a lot of ambitious projects slated for inclusion therein.
This move strikes me as a recognition of a reality: it's going to take a lot of time to integrate all those projects and turn the result into something worthy of being called FreeBSD-RELEASE.
You make a good point, but people have been talking about the commoditization of the operating system for years. Microsoft knows it, that's why they're so interested in monopoly on web services -- they know that inertia is the only thing keeping their OS monopoly going.
BTW, when you say "correlations", I think you mean "corollaries".
Most shops aren't interested in buying OSs, they're interested in getting a job done. Notice that in this deal, there's an open-source OS, but all the interesting stuff is happening in proprietary software running on top.
Your basic small shop can't afford to have IBM develop a custom solution for them atop Linux. But they can afford SQL Server!
Red Hat understands this, and as much as I dislike their Linux distribution, I think they're the only Linux company that is really tackling Microsoft on the small-business front.
This article attacks David Boies in a footnote, saying that because he doesn't have an email address, he is "technologically illiterate".
I heard that Boies is learning-disabled and does not read -- instead he has aides read relevant documents to him. He has an eidetic memory and doesn't forget what's dictated to him. (Interestingly, for that reason, he asks his coworkers never to tell him anything that they're not absolutely sure of.) So the comment I referenced is rather insensitive.
That's what they'd have you believe. But although plenty of people made paper fortunes in dot-com IPOs, the Wall St. firms that underwrote them made crisp, folding millions on every one of them.