What's Wrong with MAC Language in This Video?

[Anttech]

Here's a picture to prove it

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/6764/osxyu2.th.jpg

 

[ShawnD]

OSx doesn't work with a registry hive. But you should clean up you bin folders of orphans every now and then.

I had that not-really-a-problem with Linux. I would remove programs but I wouldn't remove the bin files. Eventually I'm left with all these shortcuts to programs and I'm not even sure which ones are valid. Bin is sort of like the Unix version of the Windows registry. It eventually just gets filled with trash.

 

[Anttech]

How are you installing your packages, through a package manager? Typically they should remove all files on uninstall, if they were packaged correctly. I am sure on sourceforge there are some until's for clean that up

 

[rcgldr]

If you ever wrote programs for the older Mac OS's, there was just too much legacy involved. The MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) just put up the equivalent of a DOS console window, and you ran batch files to assemble, compile, and link programs/resources. I loaned a set of 5 year old MPW books to a friend working on a MAC app, and he stated there was virtually no change to the MPW tools. Think C, had evolved into a 4th gen language by then though, similar to Visual Studio and it's pre-cursors. Microsoft was coming out with major updates to it's development tools all the time. Even in the DOS days, they had a lot of window's like enviroments for building and testing applications. Borland also made nice development tools. Symantec made good tools for both the PC and Macs. MPW never had any significant changes (at least not by the mid 1990's).

One of the legacy issues with the older Mac OS's was tied to the extreme way it conserved memory, which might have been needed with just 128K of ram, but not needed a few years later as ram sizes increased. Programs on the Mac used pc relative offsets, and you had to manually split up program components into 32k chunks (Think C did this graphically, MPW required you edit batch files). The other quirk was the Mac concept of handles. In the first part of each 32K chunk, you had pointers to chunks of allocated memory, normally used for the "resources" of a program. On almost any system call, the system, might page out or move all of your programs resources, so you had to make a series of calls to get your handle pointers reset (and the resources loaded back into memory if they were paged out). Bascially you ran a 32-bit CPU (68000 series) in the equivalent of an extended 16-bit mode. Because Apple was reluctant to do away with backwards compatablity, this environment went on for decades.

As mentioned previously, it was years before Macintoshes had DMA, something that PC's, and their CPM predecessors had since the late 1970's. With DMA, the system continues to run, without getting tied up waiting for I/O from a DMA driven device, and there are no time contraints on either the system or the device. On a Mac, you had to use a software handshake to get the first word of a 512 byte transfer (sector size on a SCSI hard disk), then use load multiple instructions combined with a hardware handshake called "blind transfer mode" for the rest of the words. During the hardware handshake, the entire machine was locked up. The device had to respond within 16 microseconds of each transfer request or else the machine would "bus timeout" to prevent the lockup from causing a RAM refresh cycle from being missed. Maybe not having DMA was a cost saving measure, but it wasn't passed on to the end-user as Macs were relatively expensive, especiallly after the price increases during late 1989, someone had to pay for all those parties and the working life style of Apple employees.

Mac's might have been "user" friendly, but they weren't programmer friendly. Personally, I've never owned one, but I did develop backup applications for a tape drive company, so I have had a lot of experience with the older machines and systems. I remember the promises that the next OS would be a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS, from version 6 through version 9 (they finally did it in version 10, doing away with the backward compatablity).

 

[ShawnD]

How are you installing your packages, through a package manager? Typically they should remove all files on uninstall, if they were packaged correctly. I am sure on sourceforge there are some until's for clean that up

make --install

It puts files all over the place and you have no idea where they are. Worst of all is that if you want to ever uninstall the program properly, you need to keep a copy of the source so you can do a make --uninstall.

 

[Anttech]

use a package manager, it makes life a tad easier debian apt, or red hat rpm, or any of the other disto's depending on what your flavour is. Anyway if you do a make install, it typically creates a log file, right? Can you not use this to do a tidy up afterwards (If you really want, because as u said, its not *really* a problem)

 

[rcgldr]

Regarding recovery of files, it's harder on the older Mac OS's (not sure if this is true on OSX), because each directory entry has the first 3 links to clusters, and then extensions include the rest of the link chain. Lose thse links and there's no relibable way to recover a file. On a PC, the entire chain structure is stored twice in two copies of the cluster allocation unit area of a partition, and for deleted files, only the top bit of a cluster allocation pointer is set, making it much easier to recover the cluster chain and in the process recover a deleted file, even if the directory information is long gone.

Not to say that windows is perfect either. Install enough applications (in my case applications and games), and the system starts having issues with icons, especially if two apps associate with the same icon. Some of this can be resolved by deleteing the icon cache database with is located here:

\Documents and Settings\YourName\Local Settings\Application Data\IconCache.db

Other times, the only fix is to re-install an application and re-install the updates, or (update), ask on the Microsoft forums to find out in some case the icons are kept in the installation source directories, some of which are only temporary.

Getting back on topic, it's interesting to see the original and some old comments made:

It is an old video, here's a link to the original, with some info on the parody.

http://www.happynowhere.net/mac_parody.php