Re: FreeBSD vs. OSX

From: Reed Loefgren (rloef_at_interfold.com)
Date: 12/27/03 

Date: 27 Dec 2003 08:31:38 -0800

pat <patpro@boleskine.patpro.net> wrote in message news:<BC0E13F3.A5F%patpro@boleskine.patpro.net>...
> dans l'article Px_Eb.12010$Pg1.6242@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net, Ben
> Crowell à see@my.sig a écrit le 20/12/03 17:12 :
>
> > The biggest problems we've experienced with OS X are price and stability.
> > The problem with the price is that they keep coming out with multiple
> > updates within the same year, and they expect you to pay $130 per computer
> > per update.
>
> That's not true, there is no more than 1 non-free upgrade of OSX per year,
> jumping from 10.(x) to 10.(x+1) is 130$, other upgrades are free.
> Due to a change in version number use with OSX, moving from 10.1 to 10.2 or
> from 10.2 to 10.3 is the same as moving from MacOS 7.5 to 8.0, or from 8.0
> to 9.0. These updates were not free.
> If you have up to 5 computers, you can buy a family licence pack for 200$

The point here is, from my experience, Apple charges money for
upgrades that include so little real change it should be free. They
hide behind their numbering scheme to justify another round of capital
infusion. I understand they need money; development is expensive, but
'value in exchange for capital' is a more important economic principle
to me than 'Newer! Better! Purtier...'

>
> > Stability is also a problem, although it has gotten better and
> > better with each release. Crashes and freezes still occur fairly often,
>
> Well, let's face it: it's veeeery often due to bad drivers, and/or bad
> hardware. I use OSX since the first public beta, and I've experienced 2
> kernel panics the first year, and may be 2 or 3 freezes on my G4
> workstation.

You're forgetting to mention that Apple is pumping the "industrial
strength of UNIX" in its ads, without mentioning that OSX has so much
cruft thrown on top of whatever BSD is in there as to negate any
benefits of said BSD. I work with a man who just took delivery of a
very high end BTO 15" Powerbook. It's slow for the power he paid so
dearly for, and crashes regularly when sound editing, using Apple's
own apps. No cheap modem causing trouble here, just crufty code and
bad quality control. We've advised him to raise hell with Apple, force
them to take it back as a lemon, but I thinks he's just going to dump
it; he's already said he'd sell it now if he could get the buying
price. (But electronics don't work that way, do they...)

>
> But I've seen people using some cheat USB ADSL modem (sagem 8xx or 9xx for
> example). They can get about 1 or 2 kernel panics per week.
> You must ensure you buy good quality RAM and you don't plug cheap USB
> devices (they always come with bad drivers).
> Don't blame OSX for third party software unstability (MS office, IE...)
>
> In general, you'll want to let sshd running on your OSX, so that you can
> kill nasty software from another machine. It can happen that some fullscreen
> game will freeze (UT did that to me once) and won't let you go back to OSX,
> but the underlying system runs flawlessly : ssh and kill the offending
> process.

Aside from the fact that doesn't help, say, the above powerbook user,
I can't believe you'd suggest that as a solution in a machine with
"the industrial power of UNIX" as its heritage. Run ssh just so you
can kill the lunatic gui?

Shame on you.

>
>
> > though, and you can't restart the window manager and recover gracefully the
> > way you could on FreeBSD.
>
> The window manager can be killed too, using ssh

(Shakes head.)

>
> patpro

By the by, I've used Apple machines since the LCIII and still run 9.2
on a beige G3 for my wife's invoicing. But I'll not buy another Apple
machine, in part because I see the hip, prescient Mr. Jobs make what I
consider to be some terrible blunders. Like pulling Filemaker back
inhouse, and actually letting Virtual PC fall into the hands of
Microsoft. Imagine Filemaker's front end laid over mysql. Now, _that_
would be worth paying for. That could be linux's killer app. As for
VPC, God only knows what Jobs was thinking.

Regards,

rl

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