[GRLUG] multiple login on Mac

[Bob Kline]

"Birds are descendants of dinosaurs,  but a canary is not a sauropod."

Only you seem to know that for sure.
An interesting discussion in it's own right.

Same about Unix heritage. The principles
of Unix have changed remarkably little in
40 years now, while the hardware it supports
obviously has.  Conceptually I haven't seen
much new in well over 30 years.  In every
way hardware is bigger, faster, cheaper,
more reliable, and it's this that made the
ideas of long ago practical, not new ideas.
I doubt there are any new concepts in Linux.
It's mostly that it's open and free now.
Even the Internet is not new - it's been
around for 35 years now.  What is usually
confused for the Internet by the layman,
the browser, is of course newer.

Being a "users group," we by definition
are more involved with getting packages
going and maintained than with the economic
and technology tradeoffs of Linux proper,
or even the workings of Linux, beyond how
to configure it.

That in turn is more driven by the ever
lower prices and improving performance of
hardware, and almost not at all by software.
People knew decades ago that more memory,
bigger drives and displays, faster connections,
etc., were desirable.  Nothing new there.

Don't know about dinosaurs, but as Santayana
suggested, those ignorant of history are doomed
to repeat it.  It pays to know what is truly new
and what is cosmetically new, least one flog a
distinction without a difference. I'll say that
present day Linux is little different conceptually
from the first release in terms of major concepts,
and that performance differences are more
because of silicon than software.


   -- Bob



On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam at whitemice.org>wrote:

> On Sat, 2012-01-07 at 14:19 -0500, Bob Kline wrote:
> > What kind of bandwidth would you
> > envision it would take to support a
> > remote user with a high resolution
> > display?
>
> Surprisingly little.  I ran multiple remote displays @ 1400x1200 more
> than a decade ago [over ethernet].  No problem.  Actually performance
> was really good.
>
> > Does that seem to get at why you don't see it available?
>
> No.  I don't see it available because it is not available on the Mac
> platform as a result of design.  It was not a design goal for the Mac
> OS/X people, and the feature is not available.
>
> Birds are descendants of dinosaurs,  but a canary is not a sauropod.
> The "UNIX heritage" arguments are pragmatically meaningless. And Apple's
> OS/X is only a second-cousin of UNIX anyway, it's parent is
> NextSTEP/OpenSTEP [which itself was only a UNIX-like OS; heavy on the
> "like"].
>
> Display-Postscript is not X-Windows;  NextSTEP and then Mac OS/X
> represent some significant divergence from the canonical "UNIX" (if
> there ever was such a thing, System V maybe).  The display system
> inherited from NextSTEP by OS/X is not multi-user and bound to the
> physical display [Mac uses "Quartz" which is really Display-PDF; this
> change was primarily due to licensing issues with Adobe].
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> grlug mailing list
> grlug at grlug.org
> http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug
>

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://shinobu.grlug.org/pipermail/grlug/attachments/20120107/d1708464/attachment-0001.html>