[BBLISA] Desktop policies and UNIX-ish operating systems

[Adam Moskowitz]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 01:35:24PM -0500, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> People go around saying OSX is Unix because it runs a Netbsd kernel. When
> you're a unix or linux admin, new to OSX, people assume

People assume? And that makes it not Unix. Ned, please stop. Now.

> "Well, it's a unix. You must already know how to use it

Good thing you never used AIX, or some early versions of HP-UX, or even
Solaris after running SunOS for years and years.

> at least to the level that all unixes have in common."

Again your lack of experience shows just how little you understand about
what Unix variants do and don't (or did/didn't) have in common. There
are far more differences than you realize, especially when you look at
it over my career (which is probably pretty close to your whole
lifetime).

Just because it doesn't meet *YOUR* expectations, just because it
doesn't work the way *YOU* assume it works, and just because it provides
different features that what *YOU* are used to means *NOTHING* except
that it's not what *YOU* want.

It doesn't use /etc/passwd? Neither do systems that run NIS, or LDAP, or
Kerberos, or Hesiod, or probably other things I'm forgetting! Or worse,
they use /etc/passwd sometimes, for some things, and not other times.

Your past knowledge of Unix hurt you when running OS X? SO WHAT? My past
experience running pre-Linux systems got in my way when I first started
using Linux; that doesn't make Linux "not Unix." Hell, there are some
things between the different Linux distros that are done very
differently; does that make one of them "not Unix?" No.

Can't ssh into a machine? That describes quite a few Unix systems I've
run (and by "Unix" here I mean Solaris and RHEL/CentOS). Can't run X
remotely? Hell, those machines didn't even have X installed! Configure
network settings by editing a file? Maybe yes, maybe no -- maybe you
edit the file but DHCP ignores/over-rides those settings. Does that make
it "not Unix?" Again. no.

So please, Ned, stop. Stop trying to pass judgement based on your
opinion (which in my view is biased), on your experience (which in my
view is quite limited compared to many others of us here), and on how
you want it to work. Please stop trying to pass off opinions, desires,
and assumptions as facts. In short, please just stop.

AdamM