How Mac OS X, 10 Today, Changed Apple's World 342
CWmike writes "Ten years ago today, Apple's first full public version of Mac OS X went on sale worldwide to a gleeful reception as thousands of Mac users attended special events at their local computer shops all across the planet. What we didn't know then was that Apple was preparing to open up its own chain of retail outlets, nor had we heard Steve Jobs use the phrase, 'iPod.' Windows was still a competitor, and Google was still a search engine. These were halcyon days, when being a Mac user meant belonging to the second team, writes Jonny Evans. We're looking at the eighth significant OS X release in the next few months, Lion, which should offer some elements of unification between the iOS and OS X. There's still some bugs to iron out though, particularly the problem with ACL's (Access Control Lists) inside the Finder. Hopefully departing ex-NeXT Mac OS chief, Bertrand Serlet, will be able to fix this before he leaves."
Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it's dead. Replaced by NextStep. Which is thriving.
Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. It's more like a chimera, with MacOS-like stuff bolted onto NextStep. There are still some things I preferred about the original NextStep, such as the menu arrangement.
Also, MacOS isn't really dead, just emulated. There are emulators available for original [sourceforge.net] 68k [emaculation.com] and PowerPC [emaculation.com] varieties, and for multiple platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux). The Mac OS zombie marches on, even on OS X.
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Emulated? By that standard the Atari ST and Commodore 64 aren't dead yet.
Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:4, Informative)
Not only that (Score:5, Informative)
But a lot of Mac's growth has been due to Windows running on it. We see that on campus all the time. People want a Mac for whatever reason. However they need software that is Windows only (this is particularly common in Engineering, where I work) or they are a gamer and want to play games that aren't on the Mac (see that with students a lot). Previously that might have turned them off from a Mac. However now they get one and then get Windows for it and maybe Fusion or Parallels. Our bookstore does a ton of business in Windows licenses and VMs.
So sure, more people are using Macs and OS-X but often it is in addition to, not at the expense of, Windows. Fine for Apple, they make money on hardware, but also fine for MS, they make money on software. MS doesn't care what you run Windows on, just that you run Windows.
Re:Not only that (Score:5, Insightful)
You touch on a good point. The dominance of Windows was tough to beat. MacOS X changed much of that, as did Linux. If you're a civilian, you just want to get work done. For a long time, Windows dominated for many reasons, some of them illegal competition. MacOS put more non-Windows machines in peoples hands than Linux did. Eventually, Ubuntu and some other distros could be used by civilians. Fine.
MacOS X gave Windows the competition that OS/2 couldn't and Linux (at the time) couldn't in the general market place. SunOS/Solaris couldn't do it. Apple actually innovated, rather than relying on a lot of hardware partners to do this. They were consistent, where Microsoft's architectural compromises cased huge incompatibility issues and security nightmares until they were resolved.
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Mac OS is dead, long live BSD.
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It would be cool to hear more about those days, what it was like, how certain decisions were made (Mach kernel, for example), etc.
Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, another Apple, Inc. (no "Computer" in the name any more, they removed that) knob schlob on the front page. Gee, isn't Apple great. Hasn't 10 years been great for Apple? Boy, they sure are the dominant operating system NOW (no. they're still not.) Got news for you poster, having Apple still makes you part of the "Second Team" of journalists. Just do what the marketing tells you, you're doing fine.
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And I bet you he didn't even use a real envelope, anyway...
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Apple Gross Profit previous 3 months - $10,298 million (reported on 12/25/10)
Microsoft Gross Profit previous 3 months - $15,120 million (reported on 12/31/10)
*I would have used annual numbers which were even more in MSFTs favor, but Google has different reporting months for annual data
So which is a be
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We all know how well Wall Street values companies. I mean they got it so right 2 years ago with the entire banking industry. And we all know market cap directly relates to a companies operations right? Apple Gross Profit previous 3 months - $10,298 million (reported on 12/25/10) Microsoft Gross Profit previous 3 months - $15,120 million (reported on 12/31/10) *I would have used annual numbers which were even more in MSFTs favor, but Google has different reporting months for annual data So which is a better indication of a companies strength. What wall street investors will pay for its stock, or the gross profit the company makes?
How about the development of the gross profit the company makes, you know, something that street investors use to determine what they will pay for its stock?
reign of the PK (Score:3)
Market Cap (as of this post)
Microsoft 317 Bil
Chair Man -100 Bil
Apple 168 Bil
Turtleneck 150 Bil
There, fixed that for ya.
Love the way the editor counts any kind of spendy gadget as a PC. I think he was counting PKs: personal kiosks. Easy mistake to make when you conduct census by credit card.
Apple has always been the King of Lilliput. I've seen many expensive Apple computers boat-anchored over the years out of Lilliput envy: no room for expansion here. Apple needed weeny and white the same way Schindler
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Yeah and in 2000, AOL had a market cap of ~$160 billion (which is ~$200 billion taking into account inflation) and we all know that AOL is a thriving leader in the ISP space. Oh wait...
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The "dominance" of Apple is mostly a reflection of how they are no longer really a computer company.
Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:4, Interesting)
And stock price is never, ever an indication of "dominance".
Plus, I doubt that even you would be so bold as to say that Apple's capitalization has anything at all to do with its personal computing platform and not it's consumer electronics.
As a user of Apple computers, but not really their consumer electronics, I often wonder if they will ever come out with a new operating system for personal computers.
Due to the current direction of the company, I have my doubts as to whether the successor to OSX will allow me to buy my own software and install it myself without the prior approval of Apple. I'm not even sure there will be a successor to OSX. I am not saying this to diminish Apple's success, but rather as an indication that they have "moved on" as a company, from making computing platforms that you could use to develop your own software and use for many other creative endeavors, to entertainment and other carefully curated "personal management" software. I believe they have found their niche in creating the successor to the PDA and the kind of computing in which users of Slashdot with UIDs below 1000000 generally engage. I'm not putting this new approach down, I'm just recognizing that with the iOS platforms they have found success that they never reached when they were focused on personal computing.
Apple's stock has played a big part in allowing my wife and I to send my daughter to a good university. Apple's personal computers played a huge part in my career as a creative artist. Although the Macintosh is no longer my primary platform for music or video production, and it's no longer the clear choice in any of the creative fields - graphic arts, music production, video production, photography - their part in the history of the use of personal computers in those fields is an important one.
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Slashdot's comments section fell off the map of the technologically savvy a long time ago. As you said, it's mostly just a sounding board for people who "use the internet" and think they understand how things work, and base their opinions on childish principles. Granted that it's always had a bit of that element, but the days when people discussed actual code, complete with pasted samples, are long gone.
I'm a programmer, I work with a lot of programmers and engineers, and none that I know of read Slashdot.
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Much like there are Mac zealots, there are anti-Mac zealots. With Apple on an upswing, the Mac zealots are sated, while the anti-Mac zealots are enraged.
It seems weird to give a shit either way, in my mind it's little different than following a sports team, but to each their own I suppose, which often includes needing others to share their arbitrary preferences.
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Correct me if I am wrong, but the Apple "gadgets" don't use OSX, but iOS.
Almost everything Apple uses OS wise is OS X (only things that don't are iPod Classic, Shuffle, and Nano). iOS is built from OS X, and Mac OS X is built from OS X. OS X is to Apple what the NT kernel is to Microsoft, nothing uses it on it's own, but basically all Microsoft devices are using the same NT core, just with different features and frameworks built on top of it. (That said I can't actually remember if WP7 née WinMo née Win CE uses NT)
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(That said I can't actually remember if WP7 née WinMo née Win CE uses NT)
CE is an independent operating system, it uses similar, albeit cut-down Win32 APIs
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In other news, there are more Fords on the road than Ferraris.
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In still other news Apple users think their computers are Ferraris.
Which makes a kind of sense as Ferrari makes more money licensing it's name and trademarks (to be used on mundane things) then it makes selling cars.
An Apple computer is like a normal computer with a prancing pony painted on it and double cost.
Did I just make a car analogy? Damn.
Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:4, Insightful)
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My house has Windows. I think we should factor this in to the calculation as well.
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Sure, why not? It's called a tablet computer, and it's, well, personal.
I think once you started having CPUs and could write programs for them, phones definitely became "computers". Heck, I bet your Windows Mobile phone has more resources than many of our first computers did. I know mine had less than 16K, and read everything from a tape cassette.
What about your smart-phone, or an iPad, makes it not a computer?
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> Sure, why not? It's called a tablet computer, and it's, well, personal.
I am not in control of it. It is an appliance that's mostly locked down.
It's a flat Tivo.
It's not a PC.
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yes it is. Todays phones are more powerful than computers ten years ago. They run applications, interact with remote services, and pretty much do everything a computer does.
so yes, tablets and smart phones are computers. Jailbreak an iPhone and you even have a terminal you can ssh into.
Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:5, Insightful)
"year of the Linux Desktop" is what pushed me to OS X 10 years ago. Red Hat was touting that line, while Apple was providing their first attempt at a Unix desktop. I wanted to get off Windows, and Apple provided the better path for me when I compared it side by side to Linux desktops of the time. 10 years later, the Linux desktop has gotten better, but not enough to sway me away from OS X.
Definitely don't regret the decision. I have out of the box IPv6 based secure tunneling between all my machines now by check marking a box, all my photos in an app that lets me organize them well, a decent selection of games (still not as big as Windows, but it has gotten much better in recent years), and all the unix tools I want waiting for me in Terminal.app. All in a powerful, quiet and well built hardware platform too.
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Re:Windows "was" a competitor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I mean iPhoto. Been using it since version 1 from January 2002. Back when cameras all hadn't standardized on ways to transfer photos to a computer, and most people were doing all the file management by hand. I plug in a camera, iPhoto launches, and offers to import. I can organize them into albums, and over time events, places, faces and smart albums were added to make it better. Features have also been added to let me share the photos to web sites, via e-mail, Facebook, and other places. All without ever having to manage the files directly.
And at any time I can extract out all my initial jpeg imported images out of the library this "bit of proprietary software" created and move to another program if I need to. So far that hasn't happened. I have poked at Picassa and had fun with the face movie feature, and I am glad to see the competition. It's just not quite enough to move me away from the solutions I have now that work for me.
iPhoto was one of the programs that helped me understand "The Mac way" early on, and I've come to appreciate it. With iLife apps, Spotlight, and other features, I don't manage files. I manage my content. In doing so, it's helped me realize what a proper consumer based system should look like. While the free software folks have been busy over the past decade arguing over licenses and what free and open mean, I've been bringing the joys of computing to my family members, including my elderly grandparents thanks to the consumer nature of OS X. I've given up on caring about using proprietary vs open software long ago, and instead pick what works well. In some cases it's FOSS software, in others it's free but closed software, and other times it's paid closed software.
I'm still a supporter of Linux, and continue to use it as a server OS. But I'm not prepared to switch to it as a desktop OS, nor would I even think of switching my family over. Ultimately practicality wins out for me these days over idealism.
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You can still organize photos by date stamped folders if you put them into events. But really, the point of using iPhoto is that it makes organization more than just looking through directories, especially with the new-ish Faces feature. Besides, you're never more than a right-click away from having iPhoto show you exactly where in the file system your image is located.
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Like Duke Nuke'Em Forever, that's a mirage. You keep thinking you're headed towards it, but then it just keeps moving away.
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Flamewars (Score:4, Funny)
The real reason Mac OS X exists is to fuel flamewars between nerds of different OS religions.
Re:Flamewars (Score:4, Insightful)
OS X has solved more flamewars than it sparked. It's a great middle ground, where both GUI lovers and CLI lovers are welcome. You don't have to be a fanatic to like OS X, unlike OS 9 and earlier.
Obviously, there are still good reasons to use systems other than OS X, but everyone can agree that OS X is a big improvement.
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CLI lovers may be welcome, but do they actually use it? Everybody I know who said that OS X was great because of the CLI has since switched to Linux.
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True, but a strong third (after linux and bsd) is better than being dead last.
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Sorry: Forth place after Windows, linux and bsd. Which makes it dead last unless you count OS2.
Mac heads don't get to get away with calling Windows sugar coated DOS for decades then not even count it's CLI.
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Windows *was* sugar coated DOS for a decade.
And my ranking was purely based on CLI environments. Would you really rather use Powershell or Cygwin than native Bash or CSH?
Re:Flamewars (Score:5, Insightful)
Most my computers are Linux machines, including my desktop.
My laptop is a Macbook Pro. Before that it was a Macbook, and before that it was a Powerbook.
I would not have TOUCHED a Mac if not for OS X, which is, essentially, UNIX.
I'm typing thins on my laptop right now. I currently have Firefox open, and an IM program, a VNC, and several terminals. One terminal is running Alpine on my desktop, one is doing an apt-get dist-upgrade on my media center, and one is setting up the new kernel/boot parameters for the network boot on my media server.
So, yes, people DO use the CLI in OS X, I'd say ESPECIALLY people who live in UNIX-land, but do also occasionally need to edit some video or process some photographs or record some audio.
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Incorrect. OS X is Certified UNIX.
Other than that I agree with you completely.
Re:Flamewars (Score:5, Informative)
The relevant visible parts of MacOS are pretty anti-unix actually.
Erm, no, Mac OS X is quite definitely 100% certified Unix [arstechnica.com]. This has nothing to do with the "visible parts" (you mean the GUI I assume), this is all about the underlying kernel and other subsystems of the OS, as well as some of the userland tools.
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You can be a certified unix without actually acknowledging/adhering the basic principles of what make Unix uh, what made it appealing. In those regards, OSX is almost entirely a failure (as are window management/DEs like KDE4 and GNOME, to a large degree - KDE3 was significantly better in the 'glue' regard).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Small is beautiful.
MacOS itself is quite monolythic in design. There is no "minimal install". There is no "small", for that matter.
Make each program do one thing well.
They've got applications which do a couple thin
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Well I'm an exception, Unix user since 1988: AIX, IRIX, SunOS, Solaris and SCO. And DOS user before that. I always have a terminal open in OSX. No question Linux has better open source stuff, but Darwinports is usable. And the desktop productivity stuff is better. A middle ground like parent said.
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What ARE you talking about? Your mousing comments are just plain weird and Apple keyboard short cuts are fantastic. I rarely even touch the mouse. Your second paragraph is even zanier. Long path names? So, don't put spaces in your file names. Don't like MacPorts? (That's what it's called these days). Download the source and compile it yourself. Crude mix-match of BSD utilities? What?
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Tom Servo says Mac OS is clearly superior. [youtube.com]
halcyon days? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows was still a competitor, and Google was still a search engine. These were halcyon days, when being a Mac user meant belonging to the second team
So mac users fancy themselves as belonging to the winning team now? And how exactly were the days when Microsoft propped up Apple to prevent Microsoft from becoming a noticeable monopoly halcyon? Apple's fire almost died, and they had to make heavy use of BSD licensed (free, wee!) software to rekindle the embers.
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Particularly since these days, Apple is a consumer electronics company. Their big money is in their consumer gadgets, not in their computers. Don't get me wrong, they do fine in the computer market, but it is second fiddle to their MP3 players, phones and so on. You can see this from the way they've scaled things back, like cutting out their servers, paring down their LCD selection, and so on. They make money on their computers but it isn't the big push these days.
Being a Mac user still does mean "belonging
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And how exactly were the days when Microsoft propped up Apple to prevent Microsoft from becoming a noticeable monopoly halcyon?
"Propped up Apple"? More like "settled a lawsuit" [wikipedia.org] that could have cost MS billions of dollars.
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Apple's success or failure had no bearing on Microsoft's monopoly status. They didn't compete in the same market.
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I you really still believe that Microsoft " propped up" apple with a few million dollars when Apple had Billions in the bank then its really not worth listening to your opinion of what was going on 10 years ago. You clearly weren't paying very close attention.
You see only what you want to see.
Re:halcyon days? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, you think the use of some BSD code is what made the difference?
You do understand that their kernel, Darwin [wikipedia.org], uses XNU at its core, which is largely composed of the Mach Microkernel [wikipedia.org] and BSD [wikipedia.org]. Leveraging these mature projects spared Apple (NeXT, at the time) from having to design, develop, and debug a kernel from scratch.
Yes, this is a hell of a leg-up.
"if you include tablets." (Score:2)
X has always meant 10... (Score:2)
Did anybody else spend a while trying to figure out that headline? For a minute I was wondering if they changed the name.
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Because the software publisher gets to choose their own versioning scheme?
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X has always meant 10th.
No.
One word makes a phrase now (Score:2)
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Yep.
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Counting tablets as computers for sales purposes? (Score:3)
Well if anything the proper way would be to count iOS tablet sales separately from Mac OS X sales. Combining the two is not correct as they are not compatible. When I can seamlessly run apps between both then perhaps you can count them together.
Figures don't lie but liars do figure.
fwiw I own both an iPad and iMac. I don't consider Mac OS X dominant, I only switched when I could get a native version of MS Office
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I only switched when I could get a native version of MS Office
1989 [businessweek.com], back before it was out for Windows even? Or did you mean MS Office X from 2001?
And the two are compatible. They're just not the same. I can share files back and forth between them just fine, but I wouldn't claim that they are running the same OS, even though they share their OS roots.
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I don't think the big issue is "compatible"... the big issue is that iOS devices aren't *open*. IMO it's a joke to call a device like that a home computer when you can only run programs on it that Apple allows, along with requiring an account on their online store and tracking your download and installation.
Plus, there is basically NO difference between an iPod Touch/iPhone and an iPad besides the size of the screen (and that some people use a little known bonus feature of the iPhone to make calls...) An
Was a wise move by Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing is perfect, but moving to OS X from the previous MacOS/System versions was a smart move for Apple, and was one of the reasons Apple is still around today.
Before OS X, if a program did not hand control back go the OS via WaitNextEvent(), the Mac essentially need to be restarted. In fact, Macs became so unstable, people ended up just rebooting them every two hours just to be safe.
It is an ironic contrast to these days where the only time Macs go down is a reboot to install a security patch, or a Safari update (why Safari patches require a reboot is beyond me, but that is Apple for you.)
Apple did the right thing. People yelled at Apple to get an OS that did actual, preemptive multitasking for years. Multiuser security? You had to use a utility that would do tricks to create the illusion of multiple users, such as Kent Marsh's FileGuard, Empower, Casady & Greene's [1] AME, or another utility.
Of course, there was the virus issue. OS 9 and previous did have a good number of viruses on the platform. OS X has not had a single one in the wild.
All and all, OS X has withstood this decade quite well. No major breaches in the wild (except for Trojans like the one bundled with a pirated version of iWork '09). No OS is completely secure (and it often was the first to fall in hacking contests), but it has proven to have a well deserved security reputation in the real world.
Is there room for improvement? Yes. OS X needs a modern filesystem to compete with ZFS, btrfs, and possible changed to NTFS. OS X also needs full disk encryption and not just FileVault. Hopefully Apple will address these, preferably before they run out of big cat names for OS versions.
[1]: Yep, the same Casady & Greene who made the software that was renamed into iTunes.
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I am glad Apple is getting sense and putting FDE in their OS. This has been a hurdle to get Macs adopted by IT departments, unless one makes sure that the Mac is bundled with PGP's WDE.
In the business sector, an OS on a portable machine without a well implemented FDE is a disaster waiting to happen.
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Re: full disk encryption
That is what FileVault is under 10.7. Also, apparently Apple was very close to using ZFS in 10.6, but couldn't come to licensing terms with Sun, so they scrapped it. There is still a project to maintain it out there using the development efforts for ZFS on BSD, but it's hardly supported by Apple.
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Apple was very close to using ZFS in 10.6, but couldn't come to licensing terms with Sun, so they scrapped it.
Licensing might have played a part, but ZFS is simply a poor file system for a consumer operating system. A consumer operating system must have first class support for removable media, something ZFS lacks. The vast majority of customers run a computer with a single drive and would gain very little from the overhead imposed by ZFS. Simply put, it is not worth it for most people.
Now there are lots of areas where ZFS would have been excellent but considering that Apple just killed their line of servers,
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This doesn't really make sense. There's no reason an OS must use the same filesystem on fixed and removable media.
Some glaringly obvious places ZFS benefits every kind of user:
* Snapshotting
* SSDs for caching (vastly more effective tha
Apple just killed their line of servers (Score:3)
Apple didn't kill their servers, Apple killed their blades, the Xserve [apple.com]. The Mac Pro can be and is used as a server [apple.com]. For rack mounts Apple suggests using Mac Minis, which I admit does not cut it for large installations. One problem with both solutions is they don't have a redundant power source. Mac Pros are too large for racks and the Mini lacks in throughput and bandwidth.
Falcon
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Anyway, I wonder how successful Apple would have been had they bought Be instead of NeXT. They've certainly done well on the route they took, but BeOS seemed to
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One of the common comments made about BeOS is that they didn't even have printing working at the time. The point is not that they were missing a particular feature, but that they were immature and probably missing a lot of the features needed for a consumer OS. On the other hand NeXT had already shipped several generations their OS and had been in the hands of a good number of end users.
Another important point is that NeXT is based on BSD Unix, while BeOS was a whole new operating system. Although BeOS offe
Re:Was a wise move by Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
OSX is what Linux wants to be when it grows up.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, I use it since 95, and I wouldn't install anything different to a server. But right now Linux interface (yes, Gnome, I'm talking about you) feels so old it's frustrating. And don't get me started about the beautiful-but-hiper-unstable KDE ... If KDE's stylists wold support Gnome's good but aesthetically blind developers, we may be on to something.
But right now Linux feels stuck on FVWM95, while OSX provides a CLI just as powerful (MacPorts rule, BTW) and a consistent-yet-usable-yet-nice-looking GUI.
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The truth of the matter is that NeXT---not Apple---solved the problem of Unix on the desktop by 1989.
Really.
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From time to time, my Intel-based Mini "loses" USB peripherals. Unplugging and replugging them doesn't work, but after rebooting, there they are. If I unplug and replug them enough once they've been lost, the whole machine locks up. The problem has gotten better over time, presumably due to improved releases of the OS X USB code.
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While OSX was a vast improvement, you exaggerate. The classic Mac OS was never that bad, and as one Apple developer once wrote, "A well-written app should run for hours if not days without being restarted". Even in 1992 that was taken to be a very tongue-in-cheek remark.
The sup
Too early, 10.0 sucked (Score:2)
I lived it, no one got really excited till about 10.2 - that was when OSX started feeling actually usable, also with 10.2 was SMB support (well, almost bug-free support, had to wait till 10.3 or something for well functioning SMB) which made the switch more compelling. Though at that point there were still lots of OS9 only apps out here (Adobe and Quark were two of the last to switch, mainly because of all the work 10 needed.) So, 10 years ago, Apple showed off something shiny, it wasn't a big thing till
apple should of used AMD as well as intel (Score:2)
as the old 32bit Intel macs may be cut from os 10.7 and some of the first intel mac's had crap video.
also the old G5 had more pci-e lanes then the new mac pro (amd systems had more as well)
Now apple needs to look at opening mac os to more hardware or at least a DESKTOP at the imac power with out a build in screen or offer a imac with a mate screen.
Microsoft is not the competition (Score:2)
It hasn't been for a while.
Apple is a parallel solution and will most probably continue to be so in a long, long time.
The thing is, buying a complete solution has it's uses, custom-building has other uses.
Apple is moving more and more toward complete solutions, not towards customizability.
It's not that windows is irrelevant, it's not even that it's less powerful or anything like that.
It's just that it's plain and simply not a threat to Apple, at all, they don't compete in the same markets at all.
Dell is a c
And /. was busy covering Windows when OS X arrived (Score:3)
And Slashdot didn't even cover the release of OS X. Seriously. I did a search http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aslashdot.org+2001+OS+X [google.com] and all I could find was this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11275&cid=341886 [slashdot.org]! On the other hand, we see a lot less Windows marketing content on /. these days ... http://slashdot.org/story/01/03/28/152227/Windows-Marketing-Executive-Doug-Miller [slashdot.org]
Around the same time OS X 10.0 was being officially released, Windows XP SP2 was being reviewed... http://slashdot.org/story/01/03/26/002246/CNET-Reviews-Windows-XP-Beta-2 [slashdot.org]
Back in those days I was a Linux user (I still am, I suppose, in that I have a VPS running a few websites, email services, etc., for me, CentOS based) and working as a "UNIX Administrator" running Dell PowerEdge / RedHat 6.2, and Sun UltraXXX / Solaris 8 boxen for a living. Now I'm an attorney, and it's all Mac, all the way, though I still have three Terminal.app windows open... I remember seeing one of the very first PowerBook G4 Ti machines running a developer's release of OS X; our "Advanced Platform Group" guys (who basically had an unlimited budget to buy / play with all the newest toys -- March 2001 was still in the midst of the dot-com bubble) had all the cool tech. I fell in love that day, though with law school and ExamSoft requirements, it was a while before I could go back to Mac full time...
ACL bug, root cause (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know whether to laugh or cry... I used to maintain the ACL code in the Mac OS X kernel. This is a user-space bug in the DesktopServices framework.
Although this is not usually a problem, since only foolish/untrained administrators use Finder copies on systems being used as servers, I tried several times to get the Desktop Services folks to fix this. Mac OS X has multiple "copy engines", and the one in libc gets this right, while the one in the DesktopServices framework gets this wrong.
The problem is that the finder "copy engine" code sets an ACL in the openx_np() system call, rather than using the chmodx_np() system call after the fact to set an explicit ACL. The ACL it passes to openx_np() is obtained from the source file system object via getattrlist() (but could as easily have come from statx_np()). So the ACL being set is the combination of the ACL set explicitly by the openx_np(), and the ACL being set as a result of the inheritance bit on the container directory in which the new file or directory is being created.
This is in fact necessary, since the only way to make image backups of a subtree such that the copied subtree has exactly the same permissions in the target subtree as it had in the source subtree is to set *all* of the ACLs that were on the source object onto the target. Anything else loses permissions grants or denials on the copy of the object which were present on the original. This is either inconvenient, in the case of grants, or a critical security bug, in the case of denials.
You can also see where this would be a necessary step for a backup/restore operation, where the date is serialized into an archive format on the backup, and deserialized back into the file system on a restore, which could be a partial archive restore.
Things can get even more complicated when Time Machine and Spotlight are thrown into the mix, since Spotlight adds inherited ACEs to permit it to index directory contents that would otherwise be denied it by ACL, as does Time Machine (for some reason, they do not share a common group ID and utilize a single shared system functionality ACE, but I digress...). Likewise Time Machine sets an inherited ACE on its backup volume, for similar reasons.
The correct fix is to do ACE deduplication in the case that the target directory container has inherited ACE entries which match the ACE entries on the source object, and remove duplicates from those explicitly listed in the openx_np() call. The alternative approach is to explicitly set exactly the desired ACL on the target after the target is created -- this has the drawback that you would need to explicitly know the container ACLs inherited ACE list in order to aggregate it yourself, but has the advantage that you won't be denied access to the object during creation if your openx_np() ACL contains explicit rights grants for the group or user that the creating entity runs under (this should be coupled with a subsequent "deny everyone" ACE to avoid a security race, which makes this the less desirable workable solution).
Note that the above should make it obvious why a depth-first post-application of ACLs on copied objects wouldn't work; apart from the security problems in the order of operation window, network protocols such as AFP and NFSv$ and SMB all use connection credentials rather than request credentials (NFSv3 uses request credentials), and even privileged users do not have access to other users keychains or session passwords in effect for a given copy operation.
-- Terry
Re:played with the beta (Score:4, Informative)
At the time people were saying they'd just stick with yellow dog linux. Funny how times change
Yeah, hilarious. Xserves are dead now, and Mac OS X Server won't be far behind. Thankfully you can run CentOS on a 1U budget server and still use the yellow dog update manager. :)
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At the time people were saying they'd just stick with yellow dog linux. Funny how times change
Yeah, hilarious. Xserves are dead now, and Mac OS X Server won't be far behind. Thankfully you can run CentOS on a 1U budget server and still use the yellow dog update manager. :)
And yet the story about Lion Server kicking SMB got 680 comments so far - how many did the last CentOS story get?
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Lion Server kicking SMB
Actually, it's kicking SAMBA in favor of an Apple proprietary SMB/CIFS offering. It's like dropping apache for an in-house crafted web server.
Re:Apple's World? (Score:4, Insightful)
"...a place where remote exploits simply don't exist."
Wow. Where is the -1 Delusional mod? Check out www.macexploit.com for a list of Mac OS X remote exploits that do exist.
Re:Apple's World? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, maybe he's an engineer. Comparing the 55 exploits in the list you linked to--which go back SEVEN YEARS (last entry: June 2010)--to the nearly uncountable number of exploits against Windows is effectively "nonexistent." (Note: Vista and 7 have been doing very well. But DAMN that was a long, painful stretch we had to endure under XP.)
Is Mac OS X perfect? No. BUT: Has there ever been a widespread virus for it? No. Has there ever been a self-replicating, self-spreading virus in the wild for it? No. Have drive-by downloads ever been a problem? No.
A few years ago, my teenaged son turned a Windows box from a smoothly-running specimen into an unbootable heap of molten slag (note: exaggerating, but not by much) in a single afternoon of unsupervised web surfing. I switched my wife (it was her computer) and, eventually, him, to a Mac mini, and have not had a problem since.
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You screech that as if it's going to make some difference. However, anyone that uses Linux long ago had to make piece with the fact that it was MS-DOS that won the OS wars.
Apple has it's own stores and Super Bowl commercials.
Although despite of all of that, it's still just only just partially regained lost ground.
MS-DOS nearly buried it before when the gap between Apple and Microsoft was far greater.
At the end of the day, you are still a dwarf calling a midget shorty.
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Then why wasn't OpenStep successful? Steve Jobs tried that approach.
As far as generic hardware support, they could never have gotten the drivers to work. Microsoft spends a fortune (multiple billions per year) to support buggy hardware as well as they do and that's with full vendor support. Supporting generic hardware is really really hard. Windows users have outrageous expectations due to Microsoft.