Currently:
Archive for July 6th, 2002
i should cocoa»
I’ve been lent a MacOS X iBook! This is great news, because I’ve been curious about this new OS for months – ever since I saw how many hackers were playing with it at Emerging Tech. Even better, the unspoken condition of the loan is that I do some open source hacking on the platform.
I’ll be writing most of my experiences up on the Forwarding Address: OS X” blog, but I thought I’d dump these notes down here first, because they’re a bit less technical and very unformed.
Much of the actual OS is gently familiar from my everyday Debian life. It’s the social differences that are disorienting me most of all. I’ve been looking around for good Mac sites the past few days, and getting a lot of culture shock.
- Rumour Sites
- Despite what Slashdot might imply, I don’t think it’s possible to maintain rumours for very long in Free Software land. “A little birdy tells me that Alan Cox might be working on a new I2O implementation!”. Either the object of the rumour comes along and grumpily puts everyone straight, or (if it’s a more subjective piece of gossip), two gangs of fanatics come along and flamewar each other until no one cares what the truth is anymore. In MacOS land, the only person who appears to know what’s really going on except Steve Jobs. And he’s never on IRC. It’s exciting!
- “User-contributed tips”
- Mac Websites have this quality of “I’ve been exploring and stumbled upon this cool (yet mysterious) trick! How endlessly curious is my strange friend!”. Linux sites have much less of this idea of PC as mysterious black box. Tips tend to come with long explanations attached as to why they work, and why all other ways of doing it are Considered Dangerous.
- Shareware
- I’ll say it: paying for software seems eery, old-fashioned, and frankly, a bit spiv-like. You’ll share this with me, but won’t give me the source code, and cripple it until I give you money? What definition of “share” is this? Let alone having to pay to see what the top shareware items even are. It seems so stingy. Oh, and yet, so tempting…
Not saying that any of this is bad – just that it will get some getting used to. Thank goodness for the homely familiarity of fink, hey?
seth’s analysis of palladium»
Seth has done a great job at an objective explanation of what Palladium is (and congratulations to Microsoft for explaining it to the EFF without an NDA). It’s reassured me on a couple of points – for instance, it’s possible for a 386 Linux to take advantage of the Palladium’s features, and the Palladium doesn’t leak ID data about the machine.
I still think that it has strong monopolistic tendencies however. Given that anything in the Palladium can trash anything outside of it, but not vice-versa, there’s a strong market pressure to move into the Palladium context for most uses. And now we have a situation where not only are specific applications OS-specific, but specific application’s data files are OS-specific too. This is only as bad as, say, the Microsoft Word or SMB situation was a few years ago. But there’ll be no reverse-engineered OpenOffice or SAMBA projects. It still encourages homogenuity, even while being on the face of it platform-agnostic.