Well, when it’s finally got working, perhaps it can be modified so we can fly spacecraft around this new virtual world with an assortment of laser weaponary, shields, ECM, missiles, hyperdrive, etc. just like the original computer game “Elite” for the Acorn BBC Micro. Those were the days. But can we have a minigun fitted this time please?!

Re: “Microsoft builds good operating systems”; Something that takes five minutes to boot (only three months after a fresh install) is not a good operating system.

How did you manage that? No matter how screwed up I got windows it never got took more than 2 or 3 minutes to boot, and that was usually cut down to 30 seconds to a minute by shutting down unnecessary auto-start software..

I really wouldn’t say they are “variants” of Unix or “derivatives” of Unix but rather kernels that are more or less loosely based on the principles behind Unix. You cannot, for instance, take a program from Linux and run it on Os X (or OpenSolaris, Unix, BSD, etc). It is not just a matter of recompiling, there has to be specific changes to take into account fundamental differences between the kernels. On the other hand, assuming you have the right libraries and kernel parameters, a program written for Red Hat Linux will run (maybe needing recompiling) on Debian Linux, for instance. Many (but not all) programs compiled on Debian will run without even recompiling on Ubuntu Linux (which is truly a derivative of Debian).

So I think it would be best to say that these or a series of kernels based on the same general principles, and using varying amounts of some more specific principles (and that use the same syntax for commandline). Trying to somehow say that Os X is equivalent to Linux, Solaris, BSD, and other popular kernels used for servers is not really accurate. There are reasons people don’t use Os X for servers but do use other commercial unix-like operating systems.

In fact to be unix-like it doesn’t even have to be a kernel or os. You can even make windows unix-like by using cygwin, which allows you to use unix software that is compiled to run on it. It isn’t an emulator, it is just an implementation of the components necessary to make windows unix-compatible.

Also, I recently bought my first Apple, and I found that they are not that much more expensive than the big PC brands.

It did crash – and deeply so – a Microsoft developper’s computer indeed while he was demonstrating an earlier version of the software at the Communicating Astronomy with the Public conference in Athens last October – but when it ran again, I was quite impressed by the smooth GUI. Let’s wait for the public release, though …

There’s a saying: the software is the computer.

Microsoft builds good operating systems, and they usually work fine for people. Their application suite is very good too. I will say that first, just to be clear. But their operating systems and their base designs are very flawed for usage in today’s modern always-on interconnected world.

Why? Because Microsoft by design trusts too many processes and applications with unfettered access to the heart of the computer, the kernel. The kernel is for all intents and purposes the operating system. The interface, in Microsoft’s case explorer.exe is just a program running atop it. By allowing kernel access to so many applications, it allows malware easy access to do as it pleases. And that’s why Windows, even Vista, is so easily hacked.

OS/X, on the other hand, has a UNIX background and is, in fact, a derivative of the forty year old UNIX system that has run everything from spacecraft to mainframes. It does not easily allow applications to access the kernel and in fact runs almost all applications in user-mode without full privileges. I am not saying it is perfect, but it is better. Mac users simply do not face the same security challenges that PC users do for that simple reason.

One thing that people say is that if Apple were more popular they would be hacked as easily as Windows. Wrong. The core design makes it harder. And since over 1/2 of the net’s web servers use a variant of the same OS that Apple employs, experience does not bear this out.

I use and support both platforms, as well as other flavors on Unix (Solaris, Linux and BSD) and each have their place and good points and bad. But when a user asks me what he should consider purchasing for home to write letters, surf the Internet and do his taxes, I tell them Apple, because they are more reliable and safer. The premium price of Apples is saved in time and money not spent on securing the machine.

J/P=?

But … all the (very expensive) hardware is built by Apple.

A Mac is just a PC with a fancy case and different marketing.

Apple doesn’t make all that much of their PCs any more. Most of the hardware on Macs is now the same stuff that PC manufacturers use. Certainly the CPUs, most motherboard components, video cards, and hard drives are generic. Apple uses only a subset of components from the much broader PC hardware market, so doesn’t have to deal with as wide a variety of integration problems, but that doesn’t give them all that much advantage reliability-wise.

Similarly, most of OS/X is generic too (and artificially tied to Apple hardware; it’d run on most PCs just fine, and some people have done so ).

I think this is a great idea. I certainly hope they include a search function. The way they displayed it, it looked more like you had to pan to where the object was and then zoom in; of course, you’d need to know the location of what you’re looking at for that. I wouldn’t know where to point and zoom for the Hubble Deep Field or the Sombrero Galaxy, though I recognize them when they put them up. I only hope that this works better than some of MS’s other projects. >_>

Windows XP and Vista are as stable, or perhaps more stable, than the Apple OS (though the interface isn’t as nice). But you can’t run many 3rd party applications on Apple machines, and all the (very expensive) hardware is built by Apple. Windows on the otherhand is a sandbox OS. Unless you have MSOffice and the handful of other MS apps, everything you run is 3rd party. And all the hardware is third party too.

There are a lot of reasons to hate Microsoft, but the fact that a poorly coded 3rd party app occasionally (very occasionally) crashes the OS isn’t one of them.

As far as I know VLBA relies on very accurate clocks. Try doing it with a windoze box…

[Insert obligatory Microsoft joke here.]

I worked with and on the Virtual Observatory Project, notably the VOEvent project. The VO is very much alive and functioning and looking at linking astronomical data world wide. There are VO groups at major academic and government institutions (NOAO, Los Alamos, CalTech, UC Berkeley, ESA, Univ. of Goettigen, etc.) all over the world.

Here is the official link : http://www.ivoa.org

GAry 7

When Google Sky doesn’t work, it doesn’t take the whole Universe with it.