h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What a coincidence! I had a very similar, maybe even more dangerous, experience with Linux:

In short, the memblock between 87 and 88 MB was destroyed. Two bits in all of these bytes had content according to the current geomagnetic field. But at that time I didn't know this yet.

I worked for further 6 hours(!) with the computer. It was strange. Sometimes applications crashed, once the X system rebooted, but I lost no data. Eventually I realised that some system core files had insane contents. Then I stopped working and re-installed those components. But everything became worse and worse, and I was really afraid.

A re-boot and a long memcheck showed the problem. I fixed it.

I really don't think that any Windows would have survived for a that long time, Windows is way too interlocked for that. Everything depends on everything. But be that as it may, what followed is *really* Linux specific:

The whole harddisk was, of course, studded with bad bytes. Even in very delicate files. But Linux is highly modular. All I did was to run the setup tool for updating all RPMs (=modules) with the same version. It deleted and re-installed every program.

So I could go back to work after an hour or so. The computer is totally stable for half a year now.

I use IE in conjunction with windows explorer for easy easy ftp-ing. But this conversation has converted me to mozilla for browsing.

Popping in from Galeon - this *is* as good as people say

Il V., good point; I love using IE as my FTP client in Win 2K over DSL...! You can do dirty tricks, like dragging an image from an FTP site directly into photoshop, and when you edit and save it gets uploaded again!

OS X isn't really a shell on top of BSD. Darwin is a modified version of BSD, with some kernel changes to support Mac hardware and, presumably, to make it more friendly to Mac driver developers used to something completely different. Hopefully they also took the chance to clean up a few inconsistencies of the kind that always creep in to large software systems. On top of Darwin runs Quartz, which is the graphical engine that provides Postscript and bitmap rendering functions. Then on top of Quartz is Aqua, the actual GUI toolkit and windowing system (I may have some of the boundaries wrong though). Finally on top of that are a load of programs which make the desktop useable, like Finder and the Dock.

As a whole, all those programs are known as Mac OS X, so describing it as a shell on top of BSD is inaccurate because
1) Darwin isn't BSD - it's just very similar
2) Mac OS X includes Darwin - you don't have to install it seperately

Still, it rocks!

(posted using Galeon)

Reply to post 118

"BSD IS unix. Linux is unix like"

WRONG

BSD was developed from the AT&T Unix Code and originally known as BSD-Unix but the last of the AT&T source code was removed from BSD in 1989, since then AT&T tend to get very upset if you call BSD the "u" word

Reply to post 125

I personally would describe Mac OS X & Darwin as BSD variants. Saying they are not BSD because its been optimised for a specific hardware set-up is like saying FreeBSD or NetBSD are not BSD because the don't run on a PDP/11 (the machine BSD was originally written on back in the mid-70s).

True, but in the purest sense, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD aren't BSD either, they're also BSD variants.

true but all can be said to belong to the BSD tree and in terms modern usage can fall all intents & perposes be considered to be BSD or of the BSD family

well speaking as a web designer i have used the three main ones mise netscape and opera (free)

well speaking as a web designer i have used the three main ones mise netscape and opera (free)

back on topic

Its good to hear the phrase the three main ones, so many web designers think there are only two

BUT

why not get your self a text only browser such as "Lynx" or "W3M"

now before you scream 'but who uses text browsers' let me explain ...

When designing web-pages I preview them in a text only browser (usually W3M), I figure if I can make some-sort of sense of them using a text browser then a blind person has a fighting chance using a text reader.

Oh yes, now that is a good idea.

Actually, text-only browsers notwithstanding, there are currently four "main ones" you need to test your pages on... IE5+, Netscape 4.x, Netscape 6.x/7.x/Mozilla and Opera 4+. And that's just the Windoze platforms; IE and NS4.x for the Mac are also advisable, as they both behave markedly differently to their PC-based kindred. Then there's Linux, BSD...

Nowadays I test my "personal" pages on IE6, Mozilla 1.0, NS4.7 and Opera 5.x, and if I'm doing work for someone else I also fire up my Power Mac and view the pages in IE5 and NS4.12 for Mac too...

I refuse to consider NS4.X as a current browser - if you have it get rid of it and get a browser that supports modern web standards

(see posts 9 through 22)

You still need to see how your pages look in it, in case the famous "collapsing columns" bug has created any unintentional rude messages...

no - you just include a nice message saying that the viewer is using a crap outdated browser and that you strongly recomend they upgrade.

including the following in your CSS

.ahem { display:none;}

and then the following at the top of the page

This site will look much better in a browser that supports modern web standars, visit www.webstandards.org for more info.

Feel free to change the words - it wont show in modern browsers

the credit belongs to http://webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/tips.html

I just don't bother, and tell people that it's their own fault for using a browser which is, by comparison, so old that I can't possibly support it.

That and I refuse to have the thing on my computer anymore. The only browsers I currently have installed are IE6 and Mozilla 1.0 on Windows; and Galeon, Lynx and Mozilla 1.0 on Linux. I will install Konqueror at some point, but probably not until KDE 3.1 final comes out so I get tabbed browsing. Since I don't use KDE I really can't be bothered to keep up with the betas like I do with GNOME.