blogZero - Mac

Happy Birthday Mac OS X

dwclifton@gmail.com (Douglas Clifton) — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:02:00 -0500

Mac OS X is five years old. John Siracusa takes a look at the road behind as he ponders the critical role the OS has played in Apples revitalization.

From closing the book on the original Mac to practically inventing a new platform overnight, OS X changed Apple and its users in ways that worthy of a birthday reflection. Mac OS X 10.0 was the end of many things. First and foremost, it was the end of one of the most drawn-out, heart-wrenching death spirals in the history of the technology sector. Historians (and Wall Street) may say that it was the iMac, with its fresh, daring industrial design, that marked the turning point for Apple. But that iMac was merely a stay of execution at best, and a last, desperate gasp at worst. By the turn of the century, Apple needed a new OS, and it needed one badly. Happy fifth birthday, Mac OS X, and many happy returns!

About the Author

John is a prolific writer and an authority on Apple, Macs and OS X. More than just a computer industry journalist, he also enjoys programming in Perl and is a U2 fan. I have to respect those choices. If you're interested, you can check out more of his Ars Technica articles.

Via the dnews Ars Technica News Desk RSS Feed.

Long Live the King

dwclifton@gmail.com (Douglas Clifton) — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 00:15:33 -0400

When Bell Labs finally closed its doors on Department 1127 this month, it didn't signal the end of Unix. Perhaps the end of an operating system research environment at Lucent, as most of the original team are long gone to other ventures (Google, Pixar, NASA/JPL, Princeton, Dartmouth...) or retired anyway.

Hardly. Unix was first developed around 1970 (aka the "epoch"), and the original concepts and many of the technologies are stronger than ever. The vast majority of the servers that drive the Internet and the Web are some form of Unix operating system. Hell, we wouldn't have an Internet if wasn't for the role that Unix played in it.

I use Linux, FreeBSD and OS X every day. Both as servers and as desktop environments. There are countless other Unix variants, both open-source (OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Darwin...) as well as commercial ones (Sun, HP...).

And all of this, thanks to a couple of guys who were allowed to tinker with an old PDP-11 in exchange for developing an electronic typesetting system so AT&T could publish their own technical manuals. Oh, and while they were at it they threw in a little thing called the C programming language. But that's another story.

The King is dead, long live the King!

Hey Apple: Fix Your Feeds!

dwclifton@gmail.com (Douglas Clifton) — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 21:32:54 -0400

The Apple Developer Connection is a great resource. They have tons of content, including a large list of RSS feeds. Sadly, many of them are not well-formed, do not validate, or are otherwise broken.

With an excellent Web browser product, Safari, that has lots going for it and is marketed as having great built-in support for RSS, you would think they would pay closer attention to their own feeds. The other day I was reviewing feeds waiting for approval on Syndic8 and sure enough, there was an Apple feed, yet I could not approve it because it didn't validate.

I would have done so in a heartbeat, I would love to subscribe to many of their feeds, I would love to syndicate some of them on dnews, but I can't do any of these things until they fix their feeds.

I sent them an email, I said, "hey Apple, fix your feeds!" All I got back was an stupid auto-responder:

Thank you for contacting the Apple Developer Connection regarding RSS feeds. We appreciate that you have taken the time to send us your feedback. Please be assured that all of your comments have been forwarded to the appropriate Apple team.

That was a month ago. Their feeds are still broken. The really sad part is many of the problems are trivial, one person, maybe in an hour or two could fix all of them. Perhaps I should shout this time:

blogZero - Mac

Happy Birthday Mac OS X

About the Author

Long Live the King

Hey Apple: Fix Your Feeds!

Hey Apple, fix your feeds!