Apple to preview Leopard

brinxmat · Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 262 Location: Norway

Apple press release about the "Leopard" preview.

I take it that this will be the one with the Cocoa Finder, POSIX compliance and — ahem — wholeheartedly FreeBSD underpinnings.

mosc · Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 2:04 pm Post subject:

Kassen · Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 3:53 pm Post subject:

It doesn't require a manual? WOW! I realy wonder what they did to BASH to accomplish that one.....

mosc · Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 4:17 pm Post subject:

You may be to young to remember, but early on, Macs were marketed because you didn't need a manual, just one finger to click on the mouse.

Kassen · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 3:00 am Post subject:

Yeah, I remember, but saying that about OSX is quite silly.

brinxmat · Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 262 Location: Norway

elektro80 · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 3:27 am Post subject:

brinxmat · Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 262 Location: Norway

Kassen · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 6:01 am Post subject:

elektro80 · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 3:11 pm Post subject:

nah, you don´t need it. But as you already know from Linux and from nixes such utils have been very popular. So it makes it shows up for OSX too. Just for the record, such GUI utils are mostly popular because they are timesavers.

elektro80 · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 3:15 pm Post subject:

However, it makes no sense to use such tools when you have more than one machine.

mosc · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 3:34 pm Post subject:

Linux developers' conference - for example http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/bookingform.shtml

Actually, the graphical tool kit is completeley not needed, but the Mac is almost completely graphical - most Mac users think typing tell a computer what to do is primative. In OSX, you can use text mode but God help you if you edit a file that some graphical tool also uses. I remember a time when I edited the Apache httpd.conf file on Stein's server - gasp... Or what about that time I changed my password with the passwd command. Wink

Oh, I've learned my lesson.

Linux has a bunch of X based graphical admin tools too - I never ever use them.

Still, to be fair, the shoutcast stuff on OSX is working fine without any graphical interface - never seen a single hickup with it. Solid. I can use ps, vmstat, netstat, ifconfig and top to see what's going on. nice works too. su doesn't, but sudo does... ssh is different from Linux as is rysnc, but this is explained pretty well with man. Awk, grep and sed are all there too. Symbolic links work well. Apple has put programs and directories in different places so if you know BSD this will look very different.

So, oddly, I find the Unix stuff on OSX to be just great as a user, but as an administrator it is awful. That is exactly like XP with cygwin.

Kassen · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 7:53 pm Post subject:

Hmmmm, I would have hoped for a better intergration between the graphical and the non-graphical. I tend to use the comond line when I get into trouble. At least the command line tends to tell you what is wrong and why if something fails while graphical tools have a tendency to just refuse to work in such cases.

That passwd problem is just silly... Still; It's only the first version of Unix that Apple tried, it's bound to improve with age Windows 95 was crap too while 98 was usable (mostly...) Having multiple ways to access the same thing is simply a very hard problem.

mosc · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 9:16 pm Post subject:

Apple has sort of inherited Next - at least some of the people - so they have a lot of Unix experience. Too bad they don't have the Unix mindset.

Microsoft is in serious trouble with Vista slipping. They should release a version of Linux with the great hardware support they know how to do, add some support for the legacy Microsoft programs and then cut their OS development team by 90%. We may be watching the early stages of the death of a dinosaur. I've seen it before - Bell Labs and Bethlehem Steel in this one community.

This new little MIT $100 laptop for kids is going to change a lot. With 100 or 200 million little Linux machines out there, people are going to be developing applications and porting ones that already exist. I would love to get my hands on one of these little guys.

seraph · Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 3:13 am Post subject:

mosc · Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 7:22 am Post subject:

No, more like an American senior citizen. Sad

But I still like toys... Very Happy

brinxmat · Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 262 Location: Norway

mosc · Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2006 12:07 pm Post subject:

brinxmat · Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 262 Location: Norway

mosc · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 8:17 am Post subject:

OMG, that is amazing. Shocked

I don't have time to carefully read the entire thing, but it reminds me of the Bush administration's getting involved in the war in Iraq. I had my suspicions that something was seriously wrong under the hood, but this is more absurd that I could imagine. When I got to the part about Apple changing the file path separator I about had a heart attack. And that was just the start. HFS+ lacks support in the volume format for hard links. And there is so much more insanity. What were they thinking?

Unix is an operating system with interchangable file systems and graphical windowing systems. OSX is not this.

Everytime there is an automatic software on my OSX machine, there is a long "disk optimization" that is run. You never have to run disk optimizations on a good Unix system. I should have suspected something just from that.

Thanks so much for pointing this out.

brinxmat · Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 262 Location: Norway

It took me a looooooong time to understand that this was an issue (having read the same thing time and time again); I can't say that I understand all of the ramifications, but I get the basic issue here, because you come into contact with it when working with OS X's command line.

Apple supplies some really good stuff -- their hardware is good, Cocoa is the best, the OS is better than any other, but this HFS+ thing is scary, and reason enough to migrate away. They took perfectly good *NIX and turned it into bottom juice. It is also now closed source. Excellent!

Why would they do this? The Apple market share depends on good applications; Adobe et al would have taken years (and maybe wouldn't have bothered) porting their apps to Cocoa, so Apple had to create Carbon so that standard C++ classes from the OS 9 era would still work. Carbon requires HFS+ to work. It is Mac OS 9 without the colourful apple. Those of us who used Mac OS 9 and earlier remember the Carbonisation days: Carbon ran on OS 9 too (and 8.5 if I remember rightly); Carbonisation allowed OS 9 to run OS X applications, but not proper ones (i.e. Cocoa apps).

I thought it was a good thing at the time; I was wrong.

Kassen · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:11 pm Post subject:

mosc · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:17 pm Post subject:

I would think that one would write a layer between a real file system and legacy applications rather then migrate a legacy file system to a perfectly good OS. Many of the early ports of Unix to MSDOS (like the MKS Toolkit) did this.

Somebody at Apple must have eaten the brown acid... Laughing

mosc · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:27 pm Post subject:

Kassen · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:31 pm Post subject: