Dear Trollaxor:
I've been thinking of switching lately. I've used Windows my whole life, but recently began experimenting with Linux due to political ideologies. I like a lot of things from both operating systems, and now I want one package to offer me both a nice GUI and a command line UNIX. Is Mac OS X what I'm looking for?
Potential Switcher in Dayton
Dear Gentle Sir:
Well it's been a few months and I have to say the Open Source Mullet is no longer the bleeting, sinister Linux zealot he was just months ago, and is now a valuable asset to our company. Things have certainly changed since I last wrote about him and I felt it was time to set the record straight. His nostrils no longer flare, and he no longer swears (as often as he used to), and the references to Open Source software have declined by a huge amount. I'd like to detail these changes in an effort to show the progress of a man reforming.
First off, he's stopped talking about Open Source solutions. No more mentions of the GIMP (I think my boss buying me Photoshop 6 did the trick there), no more talk of Linux on our $40,000 Sun box, no more bitching about Windows 2000 crashing (I think he finally realized that Windows 2000 drivers are a better choice than Windows NT 3.1 drivers under Windows 2000). This is such a refreshing pace, considering that there was an average of 6 Open Source/GNU options mentioned or discussed a day by my neck-blanketed hippie coworker.
Another factor in the calming of the Open Source Mullet is that my boss let him have an old PC under his cublicle to run Linux on. I think he may have promised to let Open Source Mullet run a proxy on Linux or something. It's a 200MHz non-MMX Pentium with 64 megs of RAM. Probly has a gigabyte hard drive too. So of course that quells his straining heart, and so his flared nostrils and Tourrette's-like outbursts, fueled spurts of testosterone and adrenaline, are a thing of the past. This is only a good thing.
Another factor in the calming of the Open Source Mullet is the downturn of his caffeine habit: when we worked downtown, we had an unlimited supply of coffee. He averaged 12 cups a day, often imbibed double-fisted. Since we moved to our current office, however, he has to ration himself to 8 cups a day so others can share in the java. Just that 2000mg of caffeine makes a huge difference in his disposition. No longer does he stand and exercise in the middle of the office (yes, he did this for quite a time). He now sits placidly in his chair, hunkered down over his laptop, all day long.
All in all I'd say the Open Source Mullet went from a knuckle-scraping, schwag-smoking, psychadelic Open Source hippie (Homo Sapiens Linucis) to a fine, obedient, slightly eccentric code-monkey (Homo Sapiens Eccentricis). To my boss goes the highest of kudos for manualy evolving the Open Source Mullet.
At the place where I work, there's an Open Source zealot with a mullet, the most annoying hybrid of human ever to exist.
He loves to throw around technical terms:
“Yeah, the SPARC's 64-bit!” he exclaimed to the temp we just hired.
Oh, is it, Open Source Mullet? I always thought that SPARC was 32-bit, and that UltraSPARC was 64 bit. But I don't use Linux, so I wouldn't know.
“The AS/400's a pretty open systems,” he would mouth-shit.
What the fuck!?
So I coyly asked, “How are they open?”
Man, his fucking answer made me want to rip his head off and fuck his throat.
“Well, now that Linux runs on it…” and I heard no more.
I almost wanted to cry. And he went on about how the “major players” are all involved in Open Source, and how Open Source is this and that and blah blah blah… Lord, why did he have to work here?
It had come to the point where he would spout off about Linux with all of his buzzwords every time someone asked him a question, regardless of what it was.
For example, my boss had asked me if I had Photoshop for my Mac for a web project, and lo and behold, here comes Open Source Mullet with comments about how the Gimp is just as good, etc.
I DON'T FUCKING CARE!
DOES IT RUN ON MY MAC?
CAN I INSTALL IT WITH A FEW CLICKS, OR DO I HAVE TO DOWNLOAD A MILLION LIBRARIES AND COMPILE ITS FUCKING SOURCE CODE FIRST!?
CAN IT DO EVERYTHING PHOTOSHOP DOES!?
I DON'T THINK SO, OPEN SOURCE MULLET, AND I HAVE A JOB TO DO!!!
Anyway, I tossed him my lethal grenade: “My new iBook runs Mac OS X.”
Open Source Mullet flared his nostrils.
“It's Unix. A BSD userland with an optimized Apple kernel. And Apple's GUI and apps on top. Sure as hell don't need Linux on my Mac now.”
Open Source Mullet half growled. “When the hell did that come out?”
Man, for being such an Open Source advocate, he sure hadn't paid attention to the Apple Public Source License, an official Open Source license. Could he be nothing more than a Linux mark?
Well, to end my frustration with him for that day, he started having problems with his Oracle8i install. Thankfully that tied him up for the rest of the day.
I could still hear him hissing “fuckin' bitch” under his breath every few minutes though, and something about mySQL being a lot simpler to configure.
Oh well. I had made it through another day without murdering the Open Source Mullet.
Earlier today, Apple Computer, Inc., made an official statement concerning the recent requests by many of its employees and Open Source community leaders to make the lowest levels of Mac OS X available as source code under an Open Source license.
In their statement, Apple cited many reasons for its decision to keep Mach 3 for OS X proprietary, among them being that they wouldn't want “those stupid Pee-Cee hacker geeks mucking around with our system software and mailing us suggestions.”
In light of this announcement, many are calling for Apple to take even more drastic and unexpected steps in order to embrace the Open Source community. “We want the source code to Apple's big flop, Copland!” says one young hacker. “A/UX is the other OS we want. And we'll get it!” One can only surmise what means the hacking community has to supply the Open Source coders with fodder for their compilers. “Apple is holding a lot of operating systems prisoner. We'll free them all!”
Among the other operating systems Apple holds in its vaults beside the afore-mentioned Copland and A/UX are Newton OS, Pink/Taligent, and Pong for Open Firmware.
