Mac OS X = UNIX with a GUI? - Page 4

This is the type of stuff I am interested in knowing, as a matter of fact. HFS+ vs standard UNIX's HFS (although other UNIX-es also have their own FS's, HP-UX's vxfs = Veritas FS for instance is more than 10 years old, although for sometime the file system of the kernel could be only HFS not VxFS), etc.

And as I pointed out earlier, its UNIX roots offers new interesting market opportunities for Apple in the enterprise space. RedHat and Sun should be seriously worried if Apple tried to make a dent at their expense.

Cheers!

Yours have been among the most instructive postings in this whole thread.


Why didn't I get this type of answers at the very begining of the thread? We could have avoided all the hair splitting that went on in between.

Best to all of you!

Sorry! HP-UX had its own derivative of UFS also called HFS (and most of my dealings with commercial UNIX was with HP's!),

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi_Performance_FileSystem
http://www.osdata.com/system/logical/logical.htm
"hfs: HP-UX’s Hi Performance FileSystem; native in older versions of HP-UXe20; “HFS has been the native file system since the mid 80s.”e42; operating systems that can handle hfs: HP-UX (NRWF) (NOTE: This is the second hfs that appears in the chart)"

That's where the confusion came from . Both HP's HFS and Apple's HFS have the same acronym but stand for different things.

Cheers!

Well, from my own posting,


At HP, we referred to HP's proprietary FS by hfs or HFS without distinction. HP today still refers to it as hfs/HFS in its technical doc:

http://docs.hp.com/en/B3921-60631/ne...reg_R1002_USEN



As to who copied whom with respect to the name, I don't care. And apparently neither do HP or Apple because I haven't seen any copyright/priority lawsuit filed by either company.



As I have stated I don't know how many times already, this whole thing started after a friend of mine offered to lend me one of his extra Mac's for testing for 1 month or so. I told him, well, that's great, from my experience of using Macs with OS X at Stanford's clusters, it seems like Mac OS X is a UNIX + GUI with a very nice UI, probably the best GUI among UNIX+GUI OS-es. When I made that remark, my friend hit the ceiling because according to him Mac OS X was an OS of its own whose relationship with UNIX was minimal. So I set myself to figure out the truth and that's why I posted this thread.

Please keep the dialog going because I am learning a lot!

First of all, I always referred to him as "mac preacher searching for converts" in an affectionate manner. He knows that (and if he is reading this, I assure him that I never meant to be disrespecful). One of the creators of the Mac religion seems to agree that there is a strong parallel between the feelings that many Mac users have towards their machines and religious feeling,

http://www.applematters.com/index.ph...i_talks_apple/


And for those who are not members of the Mac religion (like myself), the way Mac zealots talk about their computers makes us suspicious. I was just interested in the technical reality of Mac OS X.

In fact, this is an important aspect where those of us who were passionate about the Amiga computer during the its heyday and Mac zealots of all time differ. Ours (the Amiga) was truly several years ahead of its competition in the technical aspects (micro-kernel, preemtive multitasking, custom chips for music, graphics, animation and IO, DMA access). It didn't appeal to us, at least not to me, because its UI was fancier, which wasn't, or had nicer gadgets, which didn't since most Amiga extension HW was intended to make it even more powerful with 16 million color cards; acceleration cards 680X0 and so on, but because it was a technology breakthrough in home computer architecture that was matched only several years after by the PC and the Mac. The Amiga passion was never about faith or religious attachment but about technology which was both years ahead of its time and affordable for the average consumer.

Hadn't it been because of the incompetent management at Commodore (and I say this to you after researching extensively on the matter), the home computer market might have been quite different today. Even Apple was so impressed (and fearful) that it hired some members of the original Amiga team to work in the Mac.

Fortunately, these days there is a reborn interest in telling the history of the personal computer the way it happened, not the way the winners (MS/PC manufacturers/Apple) have been telling it since the mid nineties. Ars Technica is publishing a series of articles on the Amiga. Its last one says,

http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...re-years.ars/4


Anybody who whitnessed the first "Shadow of the Beast" when it first came out in 1989 clearly understood that no home computer of its time could match such display of graphics, animation and sound in a hardware which was essentially from 1985, with minor changes done in 1987.

NOTE: For those who didn't this is your opportunity; if you were around in 1989 and can remember the state of home computing at the time you'll be able to appreciate what I am talking about,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qipWqOwkceg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHU2guYH7Og
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6isyjVTQWUg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2b5VoCl2fw

And no, this is not some dedicated console/gaming machine. The Amiga had its own suite of business software (even WordPerfect ran on Amiga). It could be used both as a great gaming machine (which in full honesty that's what most Amiga users had it for) and a home/business computer with multimedia capabilities. All that long before the word multimedia was coined in the context of home computing. It's no exaggeration to claim that the Amiga launched the whole Desktop Video thing in the same way the Mac launched Desktop Publishing.

To hear such religious fervor on today's Mac users about a machine which is to a large degree built on a 30 year old OS (with its own implementation of course), which runs on standard industry HW and which has a multimedia architecture that has been the industry standard for ~ 15 years (and which in many ways was pioneered by the Amiga back in the mid eighties) made me very curious about what the hell were they seeing in Mac OS X, other than the very nice UI, that I wasn't seeing.


Believe me, it didn't work and that's one of the reasons why I started this thread.

I agree. The reference to the 30 years was in no way demeaning. And in fact, is one of the great things that makes Mac OS X good.


I remember reading about NeXT during the late eighties. Wikipedia says that the first release of NeXTSTEP is from 1989. My first contact with a UNIX workstation was in 1995, an HP 700 running HP-UX 9.X. Unfortunately, I never got to use a NeXT workstation, although the screenshot that wikipedia shows (it seems from 1995, v 3.3) is indeed very impressive. If it was like that right from release 1.0 (assuming of course all the other things we have been talking about the system stability because of its UNIX roots, etc were present), it was a very deep innovation.


Yep! And that the guy (Jobs) has an incredible ability to turn technology into useful products. A concept, product, that seems to be forgotten in these days of web 2.0 and web-service talking. Except for his lack of contributions to charity (which I don't know if he does in private, although when he was explicitly asked about it earlier during the year during his co-interview with Gates he kind of hinted that philanthropy is not one of his priorities), I have deep respect for Jobs. And that he was able to rise so high from such humble origins is simply astonishing.

Anyway, I am still unable to relate to the Mac religion. It doesn't turn me on.

Maybe the way you describe is better for Apple, but for geeks like me the feeling of owning an A500 during the late eighties (and I assume that the same can be said for those who were able to afford a NeXT WS in 1989 or 1990) doesn't match the feeling of owning an iPhone today, despite the fact that the iPhone is, in my view, the most "ahead of its time" product that Apple has in the market at this time. Let alone the the thing of owning a Mac OS X computer vs owning its equivalent running Windows XP or Vista.

Cheers!

Two things,

Yeah! this is the one, but I didn't include the 64 bit version of Windows (which is an extra) nor the antivirus (which is also an extra). Without those two, you get 874.99.

I have to make several comments to your comparison:

- First the fact that you can get an even cheaper Notebook if you are willing to accept a thicker PC like the Compaq Presario C700T series, is not bad per se. Just because Apple doesn't offer that option, it doesn't mean that it wouldn't be welcome by those who want to spend the minimum money possible for given CPU/GHz/RAM/HD specs. Which is one of the reasons why competition is good. You want to go the premium way, great, pick the low end Mac or the HP dv2700t. You want to go cheap, then Apple doesn't give you a choice, today you can look elsewhere. In a world dominated by Apple, you couldn't.

- Second, the fact that you included the antivirus. I would strongly recommend it but I would not put it included in the price for a fair comparison. Thanks to its UNIX roots, Mac OS X is less exposed to the type of virus/malware that affects Windows. However, DUE to its UNIX roots, Mac OS X has security issues of its own, like security exploits/holes that would allow an expert hacker to gain root control of the machine. One of my best friends at HP left the company and became a freelance security consultant (SANS certified). His expertise is in Windows and UNIX systems, a domain where he's mostly worked with HP-UX and Linux. When he was given a Mac running Mac OS X recently this summer to test his ability with UNIX systems with which he wasn't familiar (in fact it was the first time he used one), he was able to get root access in ~ 2 hours based on his knowledge of Linux/UNIX exploits / security holes (which BTW shows that certain source code of certain UNIX commands in Mac OS X is even the same as in other UNIX-es). Does this mean that you would need to include the services of a security consultant in the price of your Mac, just in case, for fair comparison purposes? I don't think so.

- Third 32 bit Vista vs 64 bit Leopard. I don't think it's fair. Again, just because Apple doesn't give you a cheap version of Leopard to chose from, it doesn't mean that every single desktop consumer will need a 64 bit OS.

The first and the third issue underscore the need of having competition in both HW and SW. If Apple was willing to sell Mac OS X on non Apple HW, the game would be very interesting. Until then, I am very suspicious of Apple's intentions.

Best!

I want to elaborate a bit more about this because it might seem from the heated exchange that I have something personal against Jobs and Apple. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have been living in the Valley since December 2000. It wasn't until 2005 that I learned more about him in the most unexpected way. Of course I had heard his name here and there, specially in this Valley where so many people love him (truth to be told, many hate him too) but Steve Jobs is not as known by the general public as Gates (though thanks to Apple's impressive performance since early 2000, especially after 2005 with the introduction of iPod/iTunes for Windows and the 2007 introduction of the iPhone things are beginning to change). In June 2005, I was sitting at home on a Sunday morning pondering whether it was worth to get dressed to go and see this Steve something who was giving the commencement speech at Stanford, where I had just completed my first year of the PhD in EE program. It seemed a lot of people where making a great deal that this guy was going to give the speech, so I ended up going. It cost me sending to the trashcan a pair of trousers (because I seated at the very back of the stadium under some trees in order to have some protection from the sun, I ended up seating on top of some resin that was falling from the tree: bye bye trousers). It was one of the best decisions of my life as student . His now famous commencement speech was extremely powerful and I have listened to it many times (I almost know it by heart).

But that said, the Apple of today is very different from the Apple of 2005. In this "just 2 years" timeframe, it has almost doubled its revenues, almost tripled its profit and its market cap has multiplied by 5 (it sucks that I didn't buy Apple stock back then). Few companies (in fact I don't know about any) that have experienced such an incredible growth in such a short period of time haven't turned evil. And if the way Apple has been dealing with the iPhone is any indication, consumers should be very suspicious of Apple's dominance. At least I am.

Cheers!

I disagree. I always made the comparison from the consumer point of view, not from the seller point of view. For a consumer deciding between buying a low end mac or its equivalent HP, the 32 bit Windows Vista Home Premium is an acceptable option. He/She doesn't need to pay the extra to have the 64 bit OS just to make the marketing guys at Apple happy.


Well, the fact that they are selling them, shows otherwise. And besides, wasn't it the whole point of the comparison? My contention was, and sorry if I didn't make it clear, that for a given spec in proc/hd/ram/screen, the standard PC hardware sold by HP /Dell is cheaper. And there are many consumers who benefit from that, which are forgotten by both Apple and the economic elite who don't care about paying the premium.


Well, I didn't make the remark in that sense. Hope it's clear now. Even at the same (or slightly similar) price for the high end configs, choosing Apple over HP or Dell locks you into Apple's SW and HW, something that doesn't happen with either HP or Dell.


Yes, but as soon as you have your computer connected to the internet, you have an IP interface connected to an IP network and you are exposed to the UNIX exploits/security holes which focus on the vulnerabilities of the TCP/IP stack and the inetd/xinetd services. Nobody uses a computer standalone anymore. Plus, if you disconnect a Windows PC from the network, the system is almost as secure as a Mac, so you don't need the antivirus either.

To summarize, I stand by my $874 vs $1099 claim. And, as I said, you even have 50% more HD and a slightly larger screen.

Best!

I never questioned the benefit to Apple's employees of his presence :-). And you can even go further. Since most manufacturing at Apple is contracted, Apple's contractors have also benefited from Apple's growth.


I respect that but, the same happens in so many areas, including the industry or fundamental research. At Stanford for instance, for each grant awarded to an academic, there is a percentage of it which goes to administrative costs. In fact, a few years ago, Stanford had to settle a dispute with the Federal Government for charging too much administrative overhead.

http://www.stanford.edu/home/stanfor.../indirect.html

Yet, the benefit for society and high tech, including Apple (one of my professors co-designed the first sound subsystem of the NeXT computer, http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/joscv...xperience.html ) of the innovations that span out of Stanford has been immense. I like to think about charity the same way. I have a modest monthly pledge to UNICEF. I am well aware that half of that money is going nowhere, especially given the corrupt nature of the UN, but it's the other half which makes me keep doing it despite being a student.

I just don't understand how somebody with the resources and influence that Jobs enjoys isn't more engaged given his leverage. These words, taken from Time Magazine's article about naming Bill G, Melinda G and Bono persons of the year underscore very well the type of impact he could have

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...2278-2,00.html




Jobs is not doing one or the other. Replacing the corrupt governments in subsaharan Africa with rule of law abiding democratic governments, which would be a prerequisite, is easier said than done. In the meanwhile, the Gates Foundation has the resources, the technology and the will, to tackle some the the most daunting problems Africa faces today. The millions who are alive thanks to Gates' generosity are a reminder of his good side (many of which would be dead due to the inability of international organizations/governments to deal with those issues) . As I said in a previous posting, I find the fact that Gates is not only putting the bulk of his wealth to charity but he himself will be focusing on the foundation full time in 6 months admirable. That by itself is a good reason to keep buying Windows to me .

Sure Steve Jobs has his reasons, and I respect them, but it doesn't prevent me from criticizing him for not doing more. In his 2005 commencement speech, he said that after he was fired from Apple back in 1985, he met with Dave Packard, and Bob Noyce, and apologized for screwing up so badly as an entrepreneur. I didn't have the chance to meet Dave Packard but if his life actions are any indication (Packard himself was strongly committed to philanthropic causes, setting a foundation in 1964 which inherited most of Packard's fortune after his death, http://www.packard.org/home.aspx ) he would be a little bit appalled that such a successful entrepreneur isn't more committed to giving back.

If Jobs plans to do it in a different manner (or he is doing it with nobody knowing), I am sorry for my baseless criticism .

When that happens, I'll recognize that I am wrong. And I truly hope that I am wrong !


I don't know. However, I have always been very suspicious of former politicians who take prominent jobs at powerful companies and of the companies who hire them. Apple is far from alone in doing it (KPCB did it with both Collin Powell and Al Gore). For Al Gore I see the money factor as a big motivator of his recent moves: he went from $1 million cash in 2000 to a net worth of ~ $100 million in 2007 (http://www.newsweek.com/id/71011).


I am not questioning Jobs contributions to the personal computer industry. But those type of contributions and philanthropic endeavors are not at odds with each other.

You have countless examples in the high tech industry of great innovators who turned out to be great philanthropists and who didn't really wait until they became billionaires to make a difference. My list of heroes in that respect is topped by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard (even Gates strong turning to philanthropy was to a large degree motivated by the early death of his mother) . Not only they created Silicon Valley, its startup culture (today, HP's revenues are higher than Apple's, Cisco's, Google's and Sun's combined), they innovated the Silicon Valley workspace, they contributed in the communities where they operated (Europe, the Middle East and Asia are full of sites where HP maintains not only sales operations but also R&D facilities which help transfer high tech knowledge to those societies) and both men gave most of their wealth to charity. The combined value of the Packard and Hewlett family foundations is 14.3 billion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...#United_States (those are last year's numbers, the growth of their endowments might have made them even bigger by now). Both men started their foundations in the late sixties, well before achieving the level of wealth you mention (even inflation adjusted). The impact of the two men's generosity is well felt here on campus (and I am sure it is felt in other places as well). Most research grad students, like myself, don't pay the tuition from their own pocket. Instead, we are supported by some type of grant (ie, we are not, for the most part, children of wealthy individuals). The Lucile and David Packard Foundation was part of the group of founding donors which endowed one of the most important of such programs, http://www.stanford.edu/dept/DoR/Fel...out/index.html. The Hewlett foundation made in 2001 the largest gift of its kind to any university to support professors and students in the humanities, a field that is often overlooked by the usual funding channels, http://news-service.stanford.edu/new...9/gift-59.html.


I do both! I am not familiar with Rothschild's life, so I'll speak for Carnegie and Rockefeller. Among the most important contributions of Andrew Carnegie was the establishment of what later became Carnegie Mellon University, which has trained a countless number of great computer scientists and pioneers who have impacted positively not only the computing industry but the world. As for Rockefeller, the university he founded, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_University, is one of today's top contributors in biomedical research. The list of honors to past and present faculty because of their contributions to medicine is astonishing. Just as astonishing as the breakthroughs those same faculty made; from the wikipedia site:


Gates, Hewlett, Packard, Carnegie and Rockefeller have made positive impact to the world both through their businesses (benefiting hundreds of thousands of employees) and the world at large through their philanthropic endeavors. Apple/Jobs so far have only contributed to the business side.


I don't think what you describe is very different from what Apple was denounced for here,

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...factories.html

later clarified here,

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/ipodreport/

or here, http://www.greenpeace.org/internatio...le-news-020507 (the change of policy described was triggered by a Greenpeace denunciation which at the very minimum shows that Apple is not proactive dealing with these matters and, if I want to get paranoid, I could also call it a PR stunt).

Businesses, and in that respect Apple is no different, need to optimize profit (I stress I said optimize, not maximize) in order to survive, let alone thrive. A company which consistently loses money has only one way yo go: Chapter 11 (which is what was about to happen to Apple before Jobs' return). In making that optimization, most companies will sure incur in some evil practices. No high tech company today can stay competitive without outsourcing some of its less strategic areas to third world countries. And though there are clearly winners in those countries (think of the programmers in India or China who have an unbelievable high standard of living that they couldn't afford without the presence of those companies in their countries), there are also losers like the manufacturing workers who are being exploited so the iPod can sell in the US at $250 instead of say $1000 (it's just an example not based on any actual analysis).


As a Valley survivor of the 2000 .com bubble I can only say that what saved the US from another depression triggered by the greed of the high-tech executives were the safe guards put in place during the Great Depression. As for the comments about the Nazis... Well, today Yahoo helped jail political dissidents in China and Apple manufactures iPods in China. In addition to the working conditions at the Chinese manufacturing facility, which can only be described as a place where first world companies exploit third world workers, based on what Chinese friends tell me about how business is conducted in China, I doubt that Apple is accomplishing its objectives without bribing Chinese politicians and government officials directly or indirectly. And I hope I don't have to convince anybody of the evil nature of Chinese Communism and the Chinese government!!!

Cheers!

Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding was that Apple's support for third party HW, like external HDs, if your Mac is running Mac OS X is pretty limited.

If your Mac is not intended to run primarily Mac OS X, but Windows, then I don't see the point of buying a Mac. Not only I am unwilling to pay the premium (for given specs I can get a cheaper HW elsewhere) but if I am to make somebody rich, I prefer to make HP (my former employer) richer than Apple.

Also, as far as I know, if I want to run Mac OS X in non Apple HW, is basically at my own risk because Apple will not support me unless I run it on Apple's HW (a decision that to me makes sense since Apple is primarily interested in selling you both HW and SW).

So to me buying a Mac is all about buying it to run primarily Mac OS X. When you make that decision, you are pretty much locked in to Apple for both HW and SW (although this locked in thing might be less severe than in the past).

Example,

http://www.macfixitforums.com/showfl...&Number=770630

The guy was able to make an external USB HD drive work with Widows but not with Mac OS X. Not sure if the guy would have had the problem with a Mac OS X running on Intel hw, although I doubt that's the problem. A USB driver is a USB driver. Besides according to him, the HD was intended to be used by both.

In HW, there is usually a difference between "official support" and "actual support". Third party HW manufacturers are more inclined to make sure their HW works flawlessly with the platform owned by 90%+ of the people than the rest. At the end of the day, this limits the available options from HW that should work well in theory to HW that actually works.

And that without getting with other type of HW like portable audio/video players which have none or limited Mac OS X support. I know, no Mac user would buy any thing different from an iPod!!!!

I confess I am one of those Windows users. But! That said, I have friends who don't share my view and decide to buy other players. They (or I in the future if the situation changes) want the freedom of being able to use non Apple digital players. A Mac OS X dominated desktop would remove, I am pretty sure, that freedom from us.

Again, from the consumer perspective it matters.


Something that Apple/iTunes won't allow for the iPod. You need to go through iTunes. Don't you see a little bit of evil here?


For historical remembrance, it wasn't until 2003 that Apple relased iTunes for Windows. The first Windows buyers of the iPod (very few indeed) were given a hard time. Now iPods are sold mostly to Windows users (according to an Apple representative that came to give a recruiting talk at Stanford; according to her too, the big acceleration in shipped iPods came in 2005 mostly due to the Windows users).


My comment wasn't mean to be a defense of Microsoft. There are way more MP3 player manufacturers out there besides MS and Apple.

As another poster commented earlier, Microsoft is at present under control due to its monopolistic trials both in the US and the EU. But Apple has still to be put under control. It's beginning to have legal issues of its own first with the iPod in France, then with the iPhone in Germany but it's far from being under control. The problem with monopolistic abusers is that by the time justice goes after them, the damage is already done.

Guys, I think I am spending too much time here. Not that I dislike the arguing but I also need a life! I might be a bit slower answering postings from now on




I think I already explained this before. I see two bad things with forcing this way of doing things:

- First is that of disk space. The fact that you cannot drag and drop on the mounted USB drive and then play makes you waste disk space at the very minimum.

- Second is the issue of privacy. In iTunes, you have a centralized application that tracks the type of music I put in my iPod. Whenever I buy a new song from iTunes, nothing prevents the iTunes client to tell the server what type of music I have been listening to lately, whether they come from iTunes purchases, CD's or digital files from other stores. Not sure if iTunes is using this to exploit consumer's privacy but the possibility is there and there is no way to work around it.

With the sync issue, the problem that I never had (since that by the time I bought my iPod it could be disabled and I did it) is that I don't trust automatic software to synchronize backups. Call me paranoid if you want, but this way of thinking comes from a few disagreeable experiences with such synchronization in the enterprise. While I understand that for the enterprise the amount of data to be backed up is so big that doing manual syncs is not an option, for my own data I rather do it manually.

Again, I don't see any problem that a user wants to use iTunes as its music central/tracker. But for those who don't want, Apple doesn't give you any option to load music into the iPod. If you trust that Apple can do no evil with knowing the type of music you listen to in your iPod, great. I don't. Not because it's Apple, but because it's a large corporation making billions of dollars in profit a year, mostly from knowing consumer preferences. Such monsters cannot be trusted under any circumstances. There have been lately two of those "I am not evil" companies exposing consumer privacy: Facebook a few weeks ago, http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130, and Google this same week, http://www.fool.com/investing/genera...-facebook.aspx.

Fortunately, Apple today allows manual sync for those users who want to. And if it was truly committed to customer privacy, it would allow a way to put music in the iPod without going through iTunes.