[thelist] Petition to bring CF ot Mac OS X

Judah McAuley judah at alphashop.com
Fri Jan 26 01:34:31 CST 2001


At 06:55 PM 1/25/01 -0800, you wrote:
>Jeff, in your post to this thread yesterday, you said something about the 
>"best tool for the job" as an argument against CF for Mac - ironic - this 
>is precisely why I would like CF for Mac: The traffic on the sites I host 
>through reselling virtual server space wouldn't come close to taxing the 
>capabilities of a single Mac webserver. I'd be tickled pink if I could 
>remotely administer a Mac with my CF sites on it. I'll give you a dollar 
>if there's no one else here that shares my sentiment for the same reasons.

I've never understood why people would think that Mac's (pre-OS X) would 
make high-performance servers.  Easy to set up and administer I could see, 
but high-performance or stable?  I don't think that Mac's are limited much 
by their hardware architecture (RISC vs. x86 CISC) and if they were more 
generally multi-processor capable, I think that the Mac hardware 
architecture could be great.  However, I really feel that web applications 
benefit in stability and performance from multi-threaded, memory-protected 
software architectures.  Mac's don't have that.  Windows has a half-assed 
version of it.  *Nix, generally speaking, has a pretty darn good 
implementation of it.  Of course, software applications need to be 
well-designed to take advantage of a good architecture, but the fundamental 
difference is quite evident.  Apple wouldn't be developing OS X off of a 
BSD kernel if it wasn't so important.

I've set up and run servers under the Mac OS, Win NT, Win 2000, Linux, and 
Solaris.  My experience has been that Linux and Solaris were most difficult 
to set up and best performing.  The Mac OS was easiest to set up and worst 
performing.  NT was OK performance and only mildly annoying to set 
up.  2000 was not too bad in either department, but not great either.  So 
where is the balance between performance and ease-of-use?  That is, of 
course, up to the end user.

I generally burned out in the OS wars long ago, I'm just glad that the OS 
vendors are, generally speaking, moving towards more stable, easier to use 
operating systems.  It may take Microsoft 20 years to develop an OS that 
doesn't crash when you install a new application, Apple 20 years to develop 
an OS that allows two programs to run at the same time and not crash each 
other, and Linux 15 years to get a desktop that is usable by people who 
aren't color-blind C++ coders, but at least they are all getting there.

I suppose that this rant deserves a tip...

<tip type="Netiquette" title="Ending rational conversation" author="Judah 
McAuley">

It is a well known rule of Internet discussion on mailing lists, Usenet, 
bulletin boards, etc. that the ability to have a rational conversation is 
immediately terminated when anyone brings up abortion, compares someone to 
Hitler, or says that the Macintosh is dead.

</tip>






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