Just installed WinXP on my iMac

[zephonic]

...frankly, it feels like I've defiled the sanctuary

 

[wmp]

Nah, you just have two flavors of the same sort of crap.

[drawback]

why?

[wmp]

A little over 25 years ago, a wise man named Henry Spencer said, "Those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it. Poorly." Indeed, M$ and Apple have been at it ever since. What Henry failed to mention is that if you do that for decades, and finally decide to go with Unix, you'll just butcher it beyond recognition. From this Unix enthusiast's perspective, OS-X total hack job. Rather than implementing the whole Mac user interface and runtime environment as the thin layer of supurfluous chrome that it is, they hacked up Unix to the core. They even renamed init to launchd. Read the manual page for configd and tell me it doesn't scream kludge. Perl librairies are kept in /usr/lib/perl on real Unix systems, /System/Library/Perl on a mac. The Mac filesystem is case insensative, just like Windoze. It won't even boot off a case sensative filesystem. I find the Mac totally unusable as a Unix workstation. The Mac Pro runs freebsd just dandy though.

 

Windoze and OS-X both provide a brain damaged absrtraction of your system. Finder actually makes Windoze Explorer look pretty good. Both are shipped configured as desktop salesmen. Both provide automatic updates that break stuff. Both are pretty much unusable without a mouse. You need both to support a complete range of some types of application software. As for stupid bugs like bad pointers, Mac software is probably worse than Windoze. For example, view a directory full of images with preview. Move or remove one of the images and see what happens when you try to scroll to that image again. Windoze picture viewer would say "image not available", mac preview just crashes.

 

The Mac craps a .DS_store file and a .Trashes directory on every network disk you mount to support crap like icons and the trash can.

 

This could become a long geeky rant, and I'd like to stop now. IMHO, they both suck. Apple is probably more loathsome than M$, because they have the audacity to call that mess Unix.

 

 

[drawback]

I meant: why (did zephonic install XP on his Mac)?

 

But I've been wondering why, if you hate M$ so much, is your monicker a well-known Windoze acronym?

 

 

It's been a very long week.

[wmp]

Those were my initials before Bill Gates was born.

 

I can't speak for zephonic, but I suspect he needs both to run all the application software he wants to run.

[drawback]

Hey man, I kinda figured on both counts. Just havin some fun... which I suspect zephonic isn't.

[wmp]

Fun is good.

 

Zephonic is probably having fun too. I haven't gotten around to running Windoze on my Mac yet, but I don't anticipate problems.

[Jonathan Hughes]

"This could become a long geeky rant"

 

could become?

[wmp]

Yeah, you right. Sorry, dude. But really, it could have been a lot worse.

 

[zephonic]

hahaha, I knew that would get y'all riled up. Anyway, I've had no problems and seriously, my iMac IS the best Windows PC I've ever had! (And I have had quite a few).

 

It's just that when you first see that WinXP logo on your iMac, it just feels like you've done something terrible to a perfectly innocent and agreeable computer. Hahaha.

 

And wmp, sure, Unix, that's what my dad tells me all the time. Likewise, some people still mourn the demise of Silicon Graphics machines, but hey...that's the way it is.

[Floyd Tatum]

A little over 25 years ago, a wise man named Henry Spencer said, "Those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it. Poorly." Indeed, M$ and Apple have been at it ever since.

 

etc,

 

 

 

Yes! Nice rant! Applaud, appluad :laugh:

[wmp]

You know Henry, Floyd? He's one of your neighbors. A geek's geek.

 

And yes zephonic, that's what I'm told. Macs are the best windoze machines. It's a pretty nice Unix machine too, but you have to run real Unix.

 

 

[zephonic]

Do you run Unix on it? How's that? And what kind of Unix?

 

[wmp]

Yes. Excellent. FreeBSD on top of OS-X and Parallels.

 

Strictly speaking, Linux isn't real Unix. It's a clone. But compared with OS-X, it's real Unix.

[zephonic]

Linux certainly not Unix. What apps do you use it for? Any music stuff?

 

[Floyd Tatum]

You know Henry, Floyd? He's one of your neighbors. A geek's geek.

 

No, but he sounds like an interesting character.

[wmp]

I know Henry in much the same way I know the folks around here. I used to hang out and talk shop on the Unix geek Usenet newsgroups in the '80s. He was the man at UT. Anybody who uses a computer uses Henry's regular expression library, or something based on it. Regular expressions are for pattern matching. A trivial example of this is M$ wildcard matching, where *.wav matches all wave files.

 

For a more complex example, this re will match many popular spellings of the Lybian Colonel President's name.

 

([kg]h?|qu?)[aei]d+h?ah?f+[iy]

 

Regular expressions are used in some way by almost every program. They're a part of most high level languages, and an indispensable tool in writing languages.

 

I'd enjoy meeting Henry. He's one of the many folks I'd like to thank.

 

I find it strange that everybody knows Bill and Stevie, and so few can name any of the real rock stars of software. I've often wondered how Donald Knuth felt about having an office in the Bill Gates Computer Science Building.