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Date:      Sun, 13 May 2001 15:28:20 +0200
From:      Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
To:        Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com>, bzdik@yahoo.com
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Crap OS X
Message-ID:  <p05100306b72437286bdc@[194.78.241.123]>
In-Reply-To: <20010512170922Z.jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
References:  <20010512130047Z.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <20010512222337.90720.qmail@web13602.mail.yahoo.com> <20010512170922Z.jkh@osd.bsdi.com>

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At 5:09 PM -0700 5/12/01, Jordan Hubbard wrote:

>  I wasn't talking as a theorist either, but perhaps I've simply worked
>  in a wider array of environments than you have.  I can certainly say
>  that my needs would be rather ill-served by MacOS 8, whereas is
>  appears to be more than enough for you.

	The thing I'm most looking forward to is reduction in the number 
of times my machine is crashed, or locked up into a state where the 
only way to recover is to pull the plug.  If real virtual memory and 
pre-emptive multi-tasking were the only things added to MacOS 9, I'd 
be pretty happy.


	As it is, I've been waiting years for someone to deliver on the 
promise of taking the Mac interface and joining that to the power of 
Unix.  Don't talk to me about A/UX, I remember what a dog it was. [0] 
NeXTStep was a better attempt (at least it was a semi-functional OS 
with a fairly decent GUI), but they had a problem with being able to 
deliver the desktop applications.

	For me, Apple has flubbed enough things in the past, such that if 
they screw up MacOS X, they're toast.  I've got tens of thousands of 
dollars of hardware and software invested in MacOS, but I've been 
frustrated enough with them for enough years that I think I'll pretty 
much toss it all away if Apple doesn't get this right.


	In my book, Apple already has one foot down that road, because of 
lack of support for AT&T/Lucent/Agere WaveLAN/Orinoco cards under 
MacOS X.  Apple won't support them because they aren't AirPort cards 
(although AirPort cards are only slightly modified WaveLAN/Orinoco 
cards to begin with), even though they use real WaveLAN/Orinoco cards 
in their own AirPort Base Station.  Lucent/Agere won't support them 
under MacOS X because they feel that this is the responsibility of 
Apple.  Somebody has to give.












[0]  Its only raison de etre' was the fact that Apple wanted the 
cheapest possible path they could get to being able to say that their 
hardware was capable of running a POSIX-compliant OS.  This way, they 
could better shoe-horn their way into US Federal Government contracts 
where the contracting officers really just wished that Apple would 
dry up and die, because they wanted their PCs dammit, but they 
weren't allowed to specify PCs directly, so one way they had of 
locking Apple out was to require that the machine be capable of 
running a POSIX OS -- regardless of the fact that they would never 
even dream of running a POSIX OS on the thing, they'd instead run GEM 
or Windows 1.0, and the hell with POSIX.

	Of course, for this, Apple chose to base A/UX on SVR2, the oldest 
(and cheapest) version of Unix that was actually POSIX compliant, as 
opposed to SVR3 which was newer, much more capable, and had a higher 
probability of actually being semi-useful.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>

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