[driven]

http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0...a=43861,00.asp

[snerdini]

Probably the biggest weakness in the BSD operating systems, for those seeking an everyday operating system, is the lack of good desktop applications. However, the BSDs have plenty of strengths in back-office applications. And if you really want a BSD-based system that has an excellent—maybe even the best—desktop and user application environment, there's always Mac OS X, which is based on BSD.

<burns>excellent...</burns>

[JLFanboy]

I guess Apple looks pretty smart for choosing BSD now, heh?

When didn't they? It always seemed to me that whenever anybody praised Mac OS X, the fact that it was based on BSD was alway brought up in a very positive light.

Still, it does rock to hear it again.

[driven]

Originally posted by JLFanboy:
When didn't they? It always seemed to me that whenever anybody praised Mac OS X, the fact that it was based on BSD was alway brought up in a very positive light.

Still, it does rock to hear it again.

There was some early criticism for not choosing Linux instead. I vaguely remember Torvolds jumping on that bandwagon too.

[JLFanboy]

I vaguely remember Torvolds jumping on that bandwagon too.

He would, wouldn't he.

[theolein]

It's the whole microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate. Linus was pissed, I think, because he had a huge fight on usenet in the early 90's with a major toolbox called Andy Tannenbaum over Linux, which was his baby, and Minix, which was Tannenbaum's baby. It seems that the actual negative points about Minix (which didn't seem much more advanced than DOS at that time and wasn't free) had almost nothing to do with a Microkernel and a lot to do with incredibly poor design by Tannenbaum, who didn't think that students would ever be able to afford 80386 machines (reminds me of Bill and 640k statement) and that Linux was too tied to the intel CPU. So Linus, for whom I have nothing but admiration, I imagine is not an avid OSX user and like a lot of the trolls on /. would probably fall over backward if they ever took a break from bitching about how cheap, fast and great Intel/AMD is and actually used OSX on a Mac.

[Nonsuch]

I guess Apple looks pretty smart for choosing BSD now, heh?

Shh ... capt. kangarooski will hear you.

[awaspaas]

To print this page go to your File menu and select Print (or use Ctrl (Control) + P on your keyboard)

[ckohler]

Originally posted by theolein:
I imagine is not an avid OSX user and like a lot of the trolls on /. would probably fall over backward if they ever took a break from bitching about how cheap, fast and great Intel/AMD is and actually used OSX on a Mac.

Maybe I'm filtering not seeing the same trolls you see, but there hasn't been a harsh anti-Mac sentiment at Slashdot ever since OSX was released. From what I read, the majority of the Slashdot community seems to support Apple. The site even has a whole section devoted to Mac news.

[Nonsuch]

Originally posted by ckohler:
Maybe I'm filtering not seeing the same trolls you see, but there hasn't been a harsh anti-Mac sentiment at Slashdot ever since OSX was released. From what I read, the majority of the Slashdot community seems to support Apple. The site even has a whole section devoted to Mac news.

Yeah, now people are even complaining that "Apple zealots" mod their comments down anytime they're at all critical of Apple. That's a problem /. probably never thought they'd have ...

[TheTraveller]

Yeah, I thank my lucky stars that Apple didn't go with BeOS. I think they'd be tits up now if they had.

[Graymalkin]

Originally posted by theolein:
It's the whole microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate. Linus was pissed, I think, because he had a huge fight on usenet in the early 90's with a major toolbox called Andy Tannenbaum over Linux, which was his baby, and Minix, which was Tannenbaum's baby. It seems that the actual negative points about Minix (which didn't seem much more advanced than DOS at that time and wasn't free) had almost nothing to do with a Microkernel and a lot to do with incredibly poor design by Tannenbaum, who didn't think that students would ever be able to afford 80386 machines (reminds me of Bill and 640k statement) and that Linux was too tied to the intel CPU. So Linus, for whom I have nothing but admiration, I imagine is not an avid OSX user and like a lot of the trolls on /. would probably fall over backward if they ever took a break from bitching about how cheap, fast and great Intel/AMD is and actually used OSX on a Mac.

Did you have to try extra hard be so wrong? Look up the conversation in Google Groups if you want the full text of it. Minix was not a poor design by Tannenbaum, it was an OS designed to teach people how to design an OS. Every component of the system spoke to every other component in a clear and defined manner which made it much easier for students new to operating system design to understand. Minix was never meant to be released to the world as an über-OS to take over the world. It's design features are still relavant today which is not true of the original Linux kernel. Minix worked well enough to learn how to write an operating system which is as much as it needed to work.

The flame war that erupted on usenet was indeed about monolithic versus micro kernel designs. It started when Tannenbaum told Linus that in his OS design class he would have not received a very high grade for his Linux kernel. It was functional but had serious design limitations. Some people backed Linux while others backed Andy. There were plenty of good points made on both sides. Many of Linus' arguements however were based on the design of Minix itself and not microkernels in general. Minix had a lot of limitations because it was designed to be an OS designers training wheels. In the real world Minix would not have been a successful OS. Acedemically however it was a very efficient and good design. Linus' arguments didn't take into account the very excellent kernel design of AmigaOS which at the time was head and shoulders above its competition.

The original Linux kernel was a fairly poor design, it only took off because of its free license. Continuous hacking has turned it from a purebred monolithic kernel into some strange hybrid between a monolithic and micro kernel design. Without these changes it would have never made it off the x86 architecture.

Of course everyone now looks and Linux like it is the golden child. Just a few years ago it was barely usable and definitely not an enterprise class OS. As Linux put it in his Usenet announcement, it was an OS for hackers by a hacker. Linux doesn't suck because of Linus' design descisions, he did what he wanted with his kernel, it just wasn't a design destined to last forever. Monolithic kernels can be extremely fast but need enormous amounts of work to be extensible and portable.

[tooki]

The BSDs have traditionally been the more conservative OSes... not as bleeding-edge high-tech as Linux, but less buggy and more secure.

tooki

[tikki]

Originally posted by ckohler:
Maybe I'm filtering not seeing the same trolls you see, but there hasn't been a harsh anti-Mac sentiment at Slashdot ever since OSX was released. From what I read, the majority of the Slashdot community seems to support Apple. The site even has a whole section devoted to Mac news.

Yes, but try and start a debate on whats better: Linux or MacOS, and there's your trolling.

[soul searching]

Originally posted by tikki:
Yes, but try and start a debate on whats better: Linux or MacOS, and there's your trolling.

There are a few who always associate Apple products with homosexuals and so on...that's never going to go away. But I agree with an earlier post that since MacOS X the anti-Mac sentiment has definitely slowed down. I think most /.'ers understand that computers are tools and you should work with the one that best fits your needs.

As far as Apple choosing BSD, I think in the eyes of some it was the best choice all along.

And Linus, he was invited by Apple to work on MacOS X's kernel but declined, giving a bunch of reasons, none of which I remember now. I always thought that he declined because of what his little crew of Linux buddies would think. Imagine, what's worse than working for Microsoft? Some of them believe working for Apple...

[Eug]

Originally posted by TheTraveller:
Yeah, I thank my lucky stars that Apple didn't go with BeOS. I think they'd be tits up now if they had.

Yeah, I have always thought that BeOS would have been a BAD idea.

And to think if the Be people hadn't driven such a hard bargain, it might just have been Be.

NeXT vs. Be. Why was it such a hard decision? As a lay person I thought NeXT just seemed like such an obvious choice, at least with my retrospectoscope back in 1999 (two and half years after the NeXT purchase was made).

By the way, back in 1999 or something I installed Be on my PC. I never understood what the hooplah was about.

[RealMac]

Originally posted by Eug:
Yeah, I have always thought that BeOS would have been a BAD idea.

And to think if the Be people hadn't driven such a hard bargain, it might just have been Be.

NeXT vs. Be. Why was it such a hard decision? As a lay person I thought NeXT just seemed like such an obvious choice, at least with my retrospectoscope back in 1999 (two and half years after the NeXT purchase was made).

By the way, back in 1999 or something I installed Be on my PC. I never understood what the hooplah was about.

When I tried it on my mac at least (PR2 back around 1997), the main things that interested me were an ultra-responsive user interface (MacOS by comparison crawled on a performa 6400), stability and a GUI.

I think part of it was out of desperation too. Windows was getting things like protected memory and preemptive multitasking and the MacOS wsa just lagging behind. The press had been hyping Copland since Summer of 95. Then we were faced with delay after delay.

Be was run by a guy who used to work for Apple. Surely he and his team have the ability to create an OS that Mac users would enjoy right? Just as the classic MacOS was proprietary, so was BeOS. At the time, people weren't too concerned about standards. They just wanted something fast, stable and modern by the standards at the time.

For me personally, the idea of a 100% powerpc optimized OS from the ground up was fascinating. It wasn't until MacOS 8.5 really that the majority of the OS was powerpc native. Even with this, it felt slow as dirt on my powerpc 603e/180 unit.

At the time of Apple's acquisition of NeXT, it was really difficult to predict what they had in mind. In retrospect, the ability to retain backward compatibility, get a significant amount of developer support and deliver a cutting edge operating system was amazing.

Apple was dead in the water with their entirely proprietary, home-brewed OS. Be was like a knight in shining armor. Most mac heads looked at NeXT and thought who?? The amount of excitement with Steve Jobs back at Apple was immense. It was almost too good to be true.

Without Steve getting fired from Apple, having the initiative to start his own company and his marketing genius I wholeheartedly think Apple would be out of business today. Or acquired by another company, like SGI, Sun or Microsoft.

Ok, slight rant there...

[King Bob On The Cob]

NeXT was the best thing that happened to Apple. You may not realize it but if Apple hadn't gone with NeXT we would've gotten the short end of the stick even worse. Alot of the freeware programs that come out right now are based on Linux programs that were recompiled and had an interface slapped on them (most the current p2p apps). I doubt the OpenGL support would've been as good so even less games than now. Also, Steve would never have returned to Apple.

[baryonyx]

The NeXT aquisition wasn't just about technology. Don't forget that Apple got Steve Jobs in the deal, too.

Apple would be dead, dead, dead if Gill Amelio had remained in charge. They dodged a bullet there.

[krove]

Windows has protected memory space (keeping each app's memory isolated)?

If true, I did not know that.

[driven]

Originally posted by krove:
Windows has protected memory space (keeping each app's memory isolated)?

If true, I did not know that.

[eno]

deleted

[stew]

Originally posted by krove:
Windows has protected memory space (keeping each app's memory isolated)?

If true, I did not know that.

Itt's been in there since the first version of Windows NT, which appeared in 1993.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryDesktop.mspx

[Simon]

Originally posted by stew:
Itt's been in there since the first version of Windows NT, which appeared in 1993.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryDesktop.mspx

Yeah, and since when in all the consumer Win versions w/o NT kernel but DOS-based? (3.11, 95, 98, ME, etc.?)

[stew]

Since 1995. The implementation in Windows95 is not too brilliant but still a lot better than the protection Classic MacOS offers (=nothing).

http://www.ualberta.ca/CNS/hyperdisp...ows95andNT.htm

(Note how the handling of Classic apps in OS X is similar to the way Windows 95 handles 16bit apps.)

[Simon]

Originally posted by stew:
The implementation in Windows95 is not too brilliant but still a lot better than the protection Classic MacOS offers (=nothing).

What a nasty comment.

But I guess this is to be expeceted when it comes to about the only reasonable feature Win95 had that Classic didn't have...

The real joke is that nevertheless a bare-bones Classic install ran more more stable than 95 ever did.

[absmiths]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
Did you have to try extra hard be so wrong? Look up the conversation in Google Groups if you want the full text of it. Minix was not a poor design by Tannenbaum, it was an OS designed to teach people how to design an OS. Every component of the system spoke to every other component in a clear and defined manner which made it much easier for students new to operating system design to understand. Minix was never meant to be released to the world as an über-OS to take over the world. It's design features are still relavant today which is not true of the original Linux kernel. Minix worked well enough to learn how to write an operating system which is as much as it needed to work.

The flame war that erupted on usenet was indeed about monolithic versus micro kernel designs. It started when Tannenbaum told Linus that in his OS design class he would have not received a very high grade for his Linux kernel.

I actually read that extremely long thread once. I was impressed mostly by Linus' disrespectful behavior. Many of his counter-points were tinted with disdain and a lack of civility. In many ways he has yet to change. Many interviews I have read with him show a contempt for the works of others and an elevated sense of self worth.

Well, he and the Linux community can have each other.

[iJed]

Originally posted by stew:

(Note how the handling of Classic apps in OS X is similar to the way Windows 95 handles 16bit apps.)

Not quite. OS X handles Classic applications by running Mac OS 9.x in a sort of "virtual computer." This is, to Mac OS X, just another process and if it crashes it does not bring down the whole OS. On Win95, if a 16-bit DOS app crashed, it could kill the whole OS since that app was not running in protected memory but in the underlying **** that originated from MS DOS.

[driven]

Originally posted by iJed:
Not quite. OS X handles Classic applications by running Mac OS 9.x in a sort of "virtual computer." This is, to Mac OS X, just another process and if it crashes it does not bring down the whole OS. On Win95, if a 16-bit DOS app crashed, it could kill the whole OS since that app was not running in protected memory but in the underlying **** that originated from MS DOS.

It's more along the lines of how Windows NT (and beyond) handles 16 bit apps by actually spawning a 16 bit environment. In WinNT this is called WOW. (Windows On Windows). The worst thing that could happen is that you could crash WOW (and all of the other 16 bit apps with it), but your 32 bit apps would keep running.

IMHO the best environment for running 16 bit Windows apps was OS/2. You could run a different 16 bit windows environment for each app. Of course OS/2 wouldn't run 32 bit Windows apps ...

[stew]

Originally posted by iJed:
Not quite. OS X handles Classic applications by running Mac OS 9.x in a sort of "virtual computer." This is, to Mac OS X, just another process and if it crashes it does not bring down the whole OS. On Win95, if a 16-bit DOS app crashed, it could kill the whole OS since that app was not running in protected memory but in the underlying **** that originated from MS DOS.

Not really. The design of Win95 is that 16bit apps share one address range which is seperate from the 32bit apps, which each get their own share of protected memory. In effect, one crashing 16bit app crashes all the other 16bit apps, leaving the 32bit apps untouched. Also, the 16bit apps share a cooperative scheduler.

Now substitute Win95 with OS X, 16bit with "Classic" and 32bit with "OS X naitve" in the paragraph above...

[bracken]

Originally posted by absmiths:
In many ways he has yet to change. Many interviews I have read with him show a contempt for the works of others and an elevated sense of self worth.

I agree. I'm always amazed that this isn't mentioned more.

[fat mac moron]

Originally posted by bracken:
I agree. I'm always amazed that this isn't mentioned more.

I agree that he can be a little pompous and self-righteous, but it is pretty amazing what he achieved... Linux is only the kernal of the OS, but it's along the lines of designing and building your own car engine out in your garage with a bunch of friends. I do find it funny that a "hobbyist" OS has grown up to something that Microsoft is forced to acknowledge, and even compete against, especially in the server market.

[stew]

Originally posted by fat mac moron:
Linux is only the kernal of the OS, but it's along the lines of designing and building your own car engine out in your garage with a bunch of friends.

Except that half of your friends are being paid by Porsche and BMW for helping you...
Large parts of today's Linux development happen at IBM, HP, SGI and other large companies. Just look at http://oss.software.ibm.com/linux/projects/?page=all - large amounts of money are being put into Linux development, even after the .com burst. Microsoft may be using the "hobbyist"-scarecrow to badmouth Linux' quality, but if you look closer at it you'll see that there's a lot of commercial interest behind Linux on the server.

[driven]

Originally posted by stew:
Except that half of your friends are being paid by Porsche and BMW for helping you...
Large parts of today's Linux development happen at IBM, HP, SGI and other large companies. Just look at http://oss.software.ibm.com/linux/projects/?page=all - large amounts of money are being put into Linux development, even after the .com burst. Microsoft may be using the "hobbyist"-scarecrow to badmouth Linux' quality, but if you look closer at it you'll see that there's a lot of commercial interest behind Linux on the server.

I'm glad that someone articulated this. If you look at the money being spent on Linux development (just the OS, not counting the major apps) you'll find that it's probably comparable to what Microsoft spends on Windows development. Just what IBM alone spends on Linux related R&D is breath-taking.

Then of course there are the commercial interests that stand to torpedo Linux ... namely SCO and their very short-term thinking.

[ndptal85]

Linus has freely admitted both in intervies and in mailing lists that he is in fact an *******. He makes not apologies for this.

When you think about it you kind of have to be an ******* when you are a project founder. Anykind of founder has to be. You're constantly surrounded by people who think they know better than you when most likely they know less, you have folks who promise you the world but are unable to deliver it or unwilling to put in the effort, and then you have an unlimited number of users clamoring for more and more features, each one of course must be implimented faster than the last one but at the same time they're spotting each and every bug that pops up in your code and ramming it down your throat.

With concerns to Linus's feelings towards Mac OS X, you have to understand that long ago Stevie J approached Linus and asked him to help create OS X. Well Linus had two problems with this. 1. He's a macrokernel kind of guy and OS X's Mach BSD microkernel just wasn't his thing. And 2., Mac OS X is half proprietary. While Linus is not the GPL zealot that Richard Stallman is he still strongly believes in it and what it stands for. Thats very hard to set aside to work for any company that creates proprietary operatings systems, even one as cool as Apple.

[Brass]

Originally posted by ndptal85:
Linus has freely admitted both in intervies and in mailing lists that he is in fact an *******. He makes not apologies for this.

When you think about it you kind of have to be an ******* when you are a project founder. Anykind of founder has to be. You're constantly surrounded by people who think they know better than you when most likely they know less, you have folks who promise you the world but are unable to deliver it or unwilling to put in the effort, and then you have an unlimited number of users clamoring for more and more features, each one of course must be implimented faster than the last one but at the same time they're spotting each and every bug that pops up in your code and ramming it down your throat.

And that justifies being an ******** ????

Strange logic

[coolmacdude]

BSD? Isn't that dying? I tho... oops wrong forum.

[Don Pickett]

The title of this thread makes me think of Bob and Doug McKenzie, eh.

[driven]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
The title of this thread makes me think of Bob and Doug McKenzie, eh.

Who?

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by driven:
Who?

Jeez, only a very important part of popular culture, ya hoser.

[driven]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
Jeez, only a very important part of popular culture, ya hoser.

Geez .... for the life of me I've never seen nor heard about that film. Sorry ...

(I'm going back to hoser school now!)

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by driven:
Geez .... for the life of me I've never seen nor heard about that film. Sorry ...

(I'm going back to hoser school now!)

Don't worry about it, eh. If you were born after 1975 you probably missed it, ya knob.