Cool Mac Gear

One of the hot topics on the Mac Web this week (hey, it's been a slow news week) has been the anti-Mac comments posted on what I'm convinced is a hoax Web site by a bogus purported fundamentalist Christian organization calling itself "Objective Christian Ministries."

One of the rants on that site, supposedly by a professor of "theobiology" named Richard Paley, says Apple Computers (sic) promotes "Godless Darwinism and Communism," and claims that OS X is based on "an older, obsolete OS called 'BSD Unix.'"

That site is a skillful parody, and I suspect that the perpetrators are Mac users themselves, but what are the real origins of the Mac OS X species?

It all began back in 1969 when Bell Labs programmers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie began refining a cancelled operating system project called "Multics" designed to work as a cooperative software development environments (e.g.: A sort oApril embryonic open source) into a variant they called "Unix."

Bell Labs management was impressed with the results of Thomson ans Ritchie's moonlighting, and eventually agreed to support continued development. Unix became the first portable operating system that could run on different types of computers thanks to the new programming language Thomson and Ritchie developed, called C.

Bell Labs' parent, AT&T, enlightenedly chose to charge low licensing fees for Unix, and it became a popular development platform in university computer science departments, leading to programmers all over the world adding innovations to the source code, squashing bugs, and sharing their modifications.

One campus that became a center for Unix development was the University of California at Berkeley, where a distinct branch of the Unix family tree evolved in in the mid-1970s, which came to be known as the Berkeley Software Distribution or BSD. Linux, another Unix kernel variant, was developed in an anologically similar way by Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki. However, BSD is considered by programmers to be a more standardized development platform than Linux, which has a vast number of open source programmers worldwide constantly tweaking its code.

In 1985, Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple Computer by CEO John Sculley, and went on to found NeXT Computer, whose NeXTStep operating system was based on BSD Unix. NeXTStep was eventually became OpenStep, and while NeXT Computer failed in the marketplace, NeXTStep/OpenStep was the reason Apple purchased the company's assets in 1996, bringing Steve Jobs back into the Apple fold the as part of the deal.

OpenStep became Rhapsody, the development base for the next - generation Mac OS -- at first esentially being OpenStep with a graphical user interface makeover.

However, rather than leaving existing Mac OS users high and dry, Apple developed the Carbon application programming interface (API) based on the original Mac OS API, which allows programmers to e created programs which ambidextrously support both the legacy Mac OS and OS X (a new, companion Cocoa API is OS X specific).

Apple also made the basic OS X operating system Open Source, naming this component of the OS Darwin. Darwin is composed of two layers -- the Mach kernel, which accesses and interacts with the computer hardware, a the BSD subsystem, which is the aforementioned collection of software that comprises a Unix variant operating system.

Because Darwin is Open Source, any interested programmer can access and experiment with its source code, and submit any innovations that transpire back into the source code tree, which potentially leads to quicker improvements and more idea input into OS development.

The last year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer declared that Open Source and be free software movement are equivalent to Communism, implying that Microsoft's privately controlled proprietary development motif is the truly American way -- his comments presumably being the inspiration for the assertions by the "Objective Christian Ministry" web site: ("the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism").

Apple, on the other hand, at the bleeding edge as usual, is the first major computer maker to embrace the Open Source movement, by placing Darwin under the Apple Public Source Licence.

Darwin he is a complete operating system in itself, and users can download and use it as freeware. However, the Carbon and Cocoa APIs and the Aqua/Quartz OS X GUI components remain proprietary Apple software.

OS X.4

From Ross Cottrell

Charles,

I just installed the OS X 1.3 and 1.4 updates on my Wallstreet machine. I have X and 9 on separate partitions.

Both updates went without a problem. I am happy that a very annoying bug has been fixed too, one which I don't recall seeing mentioned anywhere. I did report it to Apple.

My Macally USB card used to die after waking up from sleep and need a reboot to come back to life. Now the machine wakes up quickly and with all PC Cards activated. I have a printer, mouse and Handspring cradle that I plug into the USB port alternately, so this bug was keeping me from using OS X fulltime.

Overall system response seems about the same or slightly better, though I hadn't been using X much lately due to the aformentioned bug, so it's hard for me to judge. Still nowhere near OS 9's Finder response of course.

I've been using the X beta versions of Eudora 5.1 in paid mode for quite some time and find it even more stable than the production OS 9 builds. I've never lost any email while using Eudora and that is why I stick with it. Almost every other email client, some of which are otherwise excellent like PowerMail, puts all of your mail data on one file -- a risk I'm not willing to take.

The only OSX shareware I've bought so far: WindowShade X. I really use window shades and still don't like the Dock all that much. Definitely worth the $7.

Regards,
Ross Cottrell

p.s. I recently bought a Newton MP 2100 on eBay for $129 just for fun. Seems like an obvious Road Warrior connection. There is still a very lively email list, Newtontalk.net that dumps about 70-100 emails in my inbox everyday. The Newton makes a neat little micro-laptop if you connect a keyboard.

Hi Ross;

Sounds like you and I are on the same page on many points. I wonder if ViaVoice will now survive sleep/wakeup cycles under 10.1.4And without locking up and. I must try that.

Like you I have found the OS X version of Eudora 5.1 to be at least as stable as the legacy OS version, although the New Eudora 5.1.1 legacy bata is a big improvement on the current 5.1 final Classic version of Eudora. I agree with you wholeheartedly about email applications that dump all your archives into one central file. I simply would not consider using email software that employs that modality. Incidentally, OS X Mail uses mbox archive files very similar to Eudora's and so as SweetMail. Nisus Email stores your archives as Nisus Writer text files.

Love that WindowShade X!

Charles

An interesting poll

From Wayne Folta

Charles,

I just found this poll that was done in Jan of 2002 on MacFixIt's web site. It was for MacOS 9. (They're now starting one on MacOS X, which is how I found out about the previous poll).

----------
Approximately how many times has your Mac crashed (requiring a restart) in the last 40 hours of using it?

Never 20% (1,378)
Once or twice 36% (2,560)
Three to six 25% (1,735)
Seven to twelve 10% (697)
More than twelve 10% (687)
----------

The poll is not scientific and it's possible that: a) MacFixit readers
have more problems than the average Mac user or, b) readers with problems were more likely to respond than readers with no problems.

But the results do agree with my impression of MacOS 9's overall reliability, so it looks reasonable to me.

You'd fall in the elite top-20% of Mac users with your perfect record.

Hi Wayne;

You may have noticed that MacFixit is running a similar poll on OS X stability this week. The tally as of last evening was:

Approximately how many times has your Mac running Mac OS X had a crash or kernel panic, requiring a restart, in the last 40 hours of using it? never 75% 3994
once or twice 20% 1065
three to six times 4% 189
seven to twelve times 1% 37
more than twelve times 0% 22
Total votes: 5307

For more information, visit:
http://www.macfixit.com/quickpoll/viewresults.shtml

From these results we can deduce that for most users, OS X is significanlty more stable than OS 9, however, one quarter of OS X users responding had experienced crashes (or whatever) requiring a restart in the past 40 hours use. Not quite "rock-solid stability" yet. ;-)

Charles

OSX stability poll

From Guy Teague

Hi Charles:

I'd like to bring your attention to the following MacFixit poll re OSX stability at: http://www.macfixit.com/quickpoll/viewresults.shtml

As you can see, at the time i write this, anyway approx 75% of respondees say they haven't experienced a system crash in the last 40 hours. In order to be totally truthful, I had to vote with the '1 or 2' segment because yesterday morning I downloaded a beta of Virtual Pc and was troubleshooting a problem when I had a complete system freeze up until then I had been putting my system to sleep every day and it would run for weeks in-between system update mandated restarts and stray West Texas thunderstorms!

So if you add the 20% in this latter category to the 75% in the former, that is 95% of OSX users can go a full work week with 0-2 crashes. I find that a very good figure. and I would doubt any OS9.x user (present company excepted, natch!) who claimed the same.

And, I have to agree with the majority of your readers that you going 7-10 days without a crash in OS9x is truly extra-ordinary. You need to stick with that Christianity jazz cause you are truly blessed! <g>

Seriously, when I ran OS9x I was ashamed to demo it to an NT or W2k (or especially, *nix) user because it would crash 4-6 times a day on average. Of course I run a tremendous lot of beta and suspect software and continue to do so under OSX, but with the only difference being the OS, not the hardware or the applications, OSX is at least 95-99% more stable than OS9x for me on the same hardware.

And the *only* reason that I sort of believe you with your record of OS9x stability is:

1) you shut down and restart programs
2) you run relatively few MS products
and
3) you are on a PowerBook.

My experience is that my G4 PowerBook, running the exact same apps and OS as my desktop G4, experiences about 1/10th the amount of crashes under OS9x. I couldn't begin to explain this, but I have found it true when comparing every PowerBook to every desktop machine I've owned. Maybe the OS has to be much more finely tuned to the hardware on the PowerBook, I have no idea.

Just for an anecdotal example, a friend of mine bought a Mac G4 desktop, not upon my recommendation because I could not for the life of me recommend such a crash-prone system as OS9x on a Mac to any of my Linux or PC friends, but because I seemed to him to be able to do virtually anything with my Mac and he was convinced of the versatility of it. He brought it home and with just the Apple-supplied default software his machine immediately started crashing and has continued to crash at least 2-4 times a day for the last year although he runs less than 25% of the experimental software that I do. He is understandably disgusted and I am trying to encourage him to update to OSX, which I can heartily recommend to anyone. It's not perfect by any stretch, but is *light-years* ahead of OS9x as far as stability.

My recommendation to you is to do clean installs of your OSX systems. I believe you wrote in a previous Odyssey that you had not done this. The only reports I've read of people having stability problems on OSX are those who have not done a clean install and those with certain hardware, such as the Blue-n-white G3's, SCSI cards, &c.

Oh, and I absolutely refuse to call it '10'. even Phil Schiller, when asked last year, said to look at the box cover--and there's a whopping big 'X' on the box! <g>

/guy

Guy Teague
http://www.kg5vt.com

Hi Guy

I have to concede that I was amazed myself at my recent 15 days without a restart on my WallStreet PowerBook running OS 9.1. These were not cheapie days either; I was doing my regular 10 hours per day production work, running lots of beta software, and going through half the dozen or so sleep/wake up cycles daily.

My previous personal best was nine or ten days, and the average with OS 9.1 is about five days between restarts under the operating circumstances described in the previous paragraph.

Just to clarify, during the 15 days I quit all open programs ont four occasions in order to clear the Finder memory, but other than that, I keep programs open as a matter of course as long as there is any available memory left, and usually have between 17 and 24 open at any time. And this is on a machine with 192 megabytes of RAM (plus one MB of VM activated).

I'm interested in your theory about PowerBooks being more stable than desktop Macs. I don't have a whole lot of personal experience running desktop machines in the OS 9/OS Xwera. Both of my PowerBooks are admirably stable, but the G4 Cube that I had for six months last year was quite satisfactorily stable as well running OS 9.0.4. My UMAX S-900 desktop machine is substantially more crash prone then the PowerBooks, but it is a totally mongrelized collection of components. Which makes me wonder if the problem with stability on G4 Power Macs it is that day usually have a less standardized hardware configuration than PowerBooks do.

As for clean reinstalls, that would be great if one had the time. I don't. In ten years of Mac userdom I have rarely done a clean system reinstall of necessity, I would guess less than half a dozen times.

Charles

X stability

From Chris Kilner

Charles:

After reading about your new record time without re-booting OS 9, I thought you might be interested in the interim results for this MacFixIt OS X stability poll: http://www.macfixit.com/cgi-bin/quickpoll/qpoll31.pl?poll_id=000009&action=view compared to an earlier OS 9 stability poll ( see poll #4 here: http://www.macfixit.com/quickpoll/viewresults-1.shtml ). When only 5% of OS X users report 3 or more reboots in the last 40 hours (note, many people installed 10.1.4 in the last 40 hours...a good opportunity for a kernal panic considering Apple's installer problems) and 45% of OS 9 users reported 3 or more reboots over a similar 40 hour time period, I would state that OS X is clearly much more stable for most other users (myself included).

You are clearly one of the lucky 20% of OS 9 users and unlucky 25% of OS X users (a 5% likelihood if 9 & X stability are unrelated and a 7.7% chance if they are, such as due to memory module problems, according to Bays' theorem). Count your OS 9 blessings!

Peace,
Chris Kilner

Hi Chris,

Other than when I was having a particular problem with a specific piece of software, I can't recall being obliged to reboot OS X three or more times in any 40 hour period. I have only experienced one kernel panic in the six months I have been using OS X, and that was caused by a known issue in a piece of alpha software.

I am just impatient and intolerant with having to restart at all. ;-)

Charles

Changing the Default Screenshot Format

From Mark Weaver

From terminal.app type:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleScreenShotFormat JPEG or TIFF or PNG or PICT

(Make sure you change "JPEG or TIFF or PNG or PICT" to the format that you want to use) Log out and back in again.

Enjoy. -Mark

Thanks for the tutorial.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore