Would You Get A Mac?

[somebody]

Then the question becomes who is the greater idiot:

• The Mac fan troll
  or
• Somebody who reacts to a trollpost that is more than a year old, while it is most probable that the troll is no longer around.

So do you think that Mac runs on UNIX?

[OmegaZero]

This thread is very entertaining.

For the record, I have both XP and OSX boxes in my studio. The Wintel is the POWER rig in my signature, the G3 is an older model running OSX 10.2 (don't know the specs specifically). I won't try and make any new arguments, just count me in with some things that have already been said:

-> Macs are better for beginners, as MAC OS is designed to prevent a user from doing something that may not be a good idea if done incorrectly.

-> PCs are better for tweakers, as MAC OS is designed to prevent a user from doing something that may not be a good idea if done incorrectly.

-> Anything a MAC can do, a PC can do just as well given comperable hardware. In my personal experience I have found that most people who insist that MACs are better for multimedia or graphics or whatever are usually comparing their G5 to a BestBuy PC. Yes, $2500 apples are usually superior to $400 oranges.

-> MACs appear to be "immune" to viri, spyware, etc only because they are such a vast minority of the market. If there were more MACs, there would be more malicious MAC programmers - I bet a good statistician could even come up with a formula for this function.

Also for the record (no joke - I'm serious): I have only ever once had a computer virus, and it was on my MAC. I told my family it was invincible. They proved me wrong.

[Sparkytfl]

I actually like messing around building new computers and making everything look cool and be jsut the way I want it. Buying a computer that's put together and all one piece would bore me.

I use macs in my midi programming class. Really high end ones. I somehow managed to crash digital performer and lose half an hours work. I can't stand that one button mouse.

[quikkie]

sigh, I really should know better than to reply to a very obvious troll however...

@ Somebody

Don’t let its elegant and easy-to-use interface fool you. Beneath the surface of Mac OS X lies an industrial-strength UNIX foundation <snipped for brevity>

Feel free to read the rest of the page unless the long words are too much for you.

-Quikkie

[somebody]

sigh, I really should know better than to reply to a very obvious troll however...

@ Somebody

Don’t let its elegant and easy-to-use interface fool you. Beneath the surface of Mac OS X lies an industrial-strength UNIX foundation <snipped for brevity>

Feel free to read the rest of the page unless the long words are too much for you.

-Quikkie

I suppose you don't realize that the various BSDs are not UNIX. They are like UNIX, but they aren't UNIX.

You may not even know what UNIX is. You can read a description here unless "long words are too much for you": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

[alleycat]

Yawn...

By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the "UNIX" and UNIX98 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a fee to The Open Group. Systems licensed to use the UNIX® trademark include AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64, A/UX and a part of z/OS.

In practice, the term, especially when written as "UN*X", "*NIX", or "*N?X" is applied to a number of other multiuser POSIX-based systems such as GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD that do not seek UNIX branding because the royalties would be too expensive for a product marketed to consumers or freely available over the Internet; such systems claim that the term has now become a genericized trademark. To avoid this, The Open Group requests that "UNIX" is always used as an adjective followed by a generic term such as "system".

[Ralf Hutter]

IIRC, we've warned you guys at least once before in this thread to keep things civil or it would be locked.

The same warning still applies. Comprendo?

[quikkie]

Last time I read up such things, FreeBSD and all the other BSDs are based off the original AT&T sources (i.e. the first UNIX written by Ken Thompson and others) with additions written by the CSRG at Berkerly Uni, sold as Berkerly Software Distribution or BSD for short - granted there have been a lot of changes in the past 30+ years...

In all but licensing fees it's UNIX, it just can't call itself UNIX.

If you read the boot up messages of a HP-UX box it has copyright notices for BSD implementations various core system components, in Solaris the (optional) SUNWucb package contains programs that are the original BSD implementations. AIX I haven't played with enough to find out if there is anything BSDish left but I doubt it.

I haven't played with any other UNIX implementations, however I'd guess that there would be some BSDisms in most implementations out there.

As for what UNIX is, yeah I know what it is. Why are you arguing semantics?

-Quikkie

[nguyenkj]

BSD is a UNIX-like system. It spawned from Berkeley after AT&T revoked the UC's UNIX license and claimed all the code Berkeley contributed. Then BSD replaced all AT&T code with their own clones of the code, so no, it does not and cannot legally contain the old AT&T code. Then you'd have folks like SCO down your throat

[quikkie]

BSD is a UNIX-like system. It spawned from Berkeley after AT&T revoked the UC's UNIX license and claimed all the code Berkeley contributed. Then BSD replaced all AT&T code with their own clones of the code, so no, it does not and cannot legally contain the old AT&T code. Then you'd have folks like SCO down your throat

hmm, I could have sworn I'd seen attribution to AT&T in some of the files....
AFAIK (and I could be wrong) the problem was with the lack of attibution (copyright notices) in files. when it was discovered that AT&T had done the same with some BSD stuff an agreement was reached and CSRG/BSD managed to keep some files and had to replace some others (ditto AT&T).

I don't know anything about the claiming of contributed code (will search for that later).

-Quikkie

[somebody]

Yawn...

By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the "UNIX" and UNIX98 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a fee to The Open Group. Systems licensed to use the UNIX® trademark include AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64, A/UX and a part of z/OS.

In practice, the term, especially when written as "UN*X", "*NIX", or "*N?X" is applied to a number of other multiuser POSIX-based systems such as GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD that do not seek UNIX branding because the royalties would be too expensive for a product marketed to consumers or freely available over the Internet; such systems claim that the term has now become a genericized trademark. To avoid this, The Open Group requests that "UNIX" is always used as an adjective followed by a generic term such as "system".

Got too sleepy to type a response?

[Ralf Hutter]

Yawn...

By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the "UNIX" and UNIX98 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a fee to The Open Group. Systems licensed to use the UNIX® trademark include AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64, A/UX and a part of z/OS.

In practice, the term, especially when written as "UN*X", "*NIX", or "*N?X" is applied to a number of other multiuser POSIX-based systems such as GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD that do not seek UNIX branding because the royalties would be too expensive for a product marketed to consumers or freely available over the Internet; such systems claim that the term has now become a genericized trademark. To avoid this, The Open Group requests that "UNIX" is always used as an adjective followed by a generic term such as "system".

Got too sleepy to type a response?

LAST WARNING!!!

Next troll post and this thread is toast.

WTF is wrong with you people?

[mathias]

Better say this before the thread's locked. IMO apple appears to be very much against DIY'ers; it's one thing for them to not want to write a lot of drivers and so not let people buy most of their components themselves, but I see no reason why they couldn't allow the option of buying "mac kits", with the CPU, motherboard and all the other stuff that noods drivers or is likely to have compatitibility issues, and let people buy their own case, power supply, heatsink, hard drives and so on. I guess they just really like to gouge.

[Seal]

Better say this before the thread's locked. IMO apple appears to be very much against DIY'ers; it's one thing for them to not want to write a lot of drivers and so not let people buy most of their components themselves, but I see no reason why they couldn't allow the option of buying "mac kits", with the CPU, motherboard and all the other stuff that noods drivers or is likely to have compatitibility issues, and let people buy their own case, power supply, heatsink, hard drives and so on. I guess they just really like to gouge.

again... making an effort not to get this thread locked... (pls dont be twats when u reply)

semi not true ish, since i started this thread, i bought and sold my first apple, a 12" powerbook. Now im on my second, a mac mini! Although were not supposed to modify it, ive overclocked mine from 1.25ghz to 1.5ghz, buffed up the ram to 1gb and also replaced the hard drive from a 5200rpm laptop one to a 7200rpm laptop one. Its evil fast! Ive also modified the cooling system slightly. Even though i now have a mac too, it still dosent scare away the modder in me!

... and just for the record, i love my mac. (but having said that i still love my pc too) i wouldnt give up either, but again i wouldnt chose one over the other, theyre both awesome pieces of kit!

[mathias]

That's exactly it, you need to mod a mac to begin to approach the level of customizability you'd get from a PC without that effort. And whether or not you can replace the components, you've still had to buy a full set of them from apple, so they have to get at least one chance to gouge you.

With PC's, you can choose pretty much everything. From the heatsink to the OS. It's so hypocritical when mac users call PC users borgs.

I remember that a while ago someone from sun said that in a few years, hardware will be included for free together with software, and microsoft applauded that statement as "revolutionary".

[alleycat]

Seal, could you provide more details of your mac mini mods, especially with regards to the cooling system?

[Seal]

Seal, could you provide more details of your mac mini mods, especially with regards to the cooling system?

sure, er the only major mod was the overclocking, which requires re-soldering of the mini's motherboard PCB, its quite tricky stuff and not for the faint hearted, as i already said, it invalidates your warranty instantly. It basically requires de-soldering and some re-soldering of fixed surface mount resistors. This resultantly changes the CPU's multiplier thus = overclock.

The modifications to the cooling system were only pretty basic actually, I just lapped the surface of the aluminium heatsink (which wasnt finished to a very high standard out of the factory) and cleaned off all the thermal pad gunk and replaced it with some arctic silver 5.

Upgrading the ram, was basically just a straight swap, so pretty simple there. Likewise with the Hard Drive (make sure you buy a laptop hard drive)

The final last thing which can be modified on the mini which i havent, is upgrading the dvd drive to a writeable one.

heres some pics...







The Mini's G4 Processor



Front of the mini - dvd drive on top, mini speaker just below, hard drive buried just under the dvd drive.



Sorry for the blury pic, its very tiny, look almost exactly in the centre of the image, and see if you can notice the modifications - look for removed resistors.


The size of the resistors you have to remove. (yes theyre that tiny!)

[Anorexicpeanut]

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