"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
reddred wrote:

Zdnet will never print an article called 'Apple - keeping Mach alive' but
they will call MacOS 'Unix' over and over. The integration at
kernel-level
of Apple's Mach with BSD clouds the issue even further. I guess it's not
written in stone, but I'm not sure where the motivation would come from
to
change it at this point, so for all practical purposes it remains
'Unix-like'.

Unix-like is okay. But saying it's Unix isn't to my mind.


The Open Group doesn't even want people to say 'Unix-like', but a lot of
people agree with you. To people outside of the field though, I think saying
'Unix' is becoming like saying 'Xerox'.

and reminiscent of some
of the nasty kludges used to make VMS and Unix machines talk.

But now when you NFS mount that file from a Unix box, all of the
information
is lost. You take that ISAM file and use ftp to copy it over to another
machine, and all of a sudden the OS thinks it's a STREAM_LF file and you
need to go in and tweak the format parameters by hand to make them match.


That's relevant to the problems with doing any file system involving some
kind of metadata at this point.

The VMS filesystem is really amazing for commercial database applications,
and it's really a shame to see it going away in favor of lowest common
denominator heirarchical filesystems like the 4.2 and NT filesystems.

Shame about DEC in general. But then, they had standards issues as well -
and standards are almost always the lcd. Hopefully it just gets better over
time.

jb