Nov 20, 2008

QNX 6.4 > 6.3

I had been running QNX 6.3 on my trusty old 1.4 GHz Pentium III system with two gigs of memory for the last couple years and it was alright. Never quite fast enough despite decent hardware (P3 chips were 2x as fast as P4s clock per clock, don't whine otherwise) and limited hardware support, I was looking forward to the upgrade because, finally, after four years I might get a better-optimized system.

Nov 17, 2008

FreeBSD Owes Apple Big

The other day, while booting my eight-core 3.2 GHz Mac Pro with 32 GiB RAM, I watched my system startup messages (nvram boot-args="-v") and thought of Darwin's origins at NeXT as a pastiche of academic research and hacker hobby. Darwin has come so far and exhibits the best of long-term software engineering. But while thinking of how far Darwin has come, I also thought of all it has given back to FreeBSD. By the time my Mac had loaded my desktop, I was at work researching just how much FreeBSD owes Apple.