Yeah, I was definitely more impressed with the 802.11 chipsets and gear they used in the PPC PowerBooks and iBooks. My older 2009 Macbook doesn't seem to have as many issues as my newer Air does though.

Oh, forgot to mention. OSX is directly derived from NeXTStep. Which also wasn't X11 based and was around since 1988. So no, it wasn't for "marketing" purposes.

I'm pretty sure EVERY UNIX vendor used UNIX for "marketing purposes".... it couldn't have been because it was the quickest path to a full pre-emptive multitasking environment with full multiuser capabilities that had been rigorously tested for over a decade.

It's more UNIX-like under the surface of the UI than any modern Linux distro I can think of personally. A lot of us actively manage REAL UNIX boxes as well and think you're full of crap.

The major difference is the fact that it doesn't use a dated clusterf**k of a GUI environment and has actually evolved since the 80's instead of piling kludge on top of kludge to mimic functionality found in other more high-performance GUI environments.

Would OSX be my SERVER environment of choice? Probably not. But as far as UNIX WORKSTATIONS with real desktop software go, OSX is lightyears ahead of anything Linux or FreeBSD have to offer. Or any commercial UNIX vendor for that matter.

OSX is quite a bit less f**ked up than Solaris. And OSX is the most widely used UNIX desktop environment on the planet. And I'm glad it doesn't use the GNU userland, I prefer BSD anyway. If you want OSX to be more traditionally UNIXy, install MacPorts, XCode, XQuartz and TotalTerminal. And go tick some checkboxes in various preferences in Finder and such to make it work as you expect.

You bash OSX yet every modern FOSS desktop tries to mimic it terribly and cram Windows-like UI elements in as well. And the Linux crowd is doing its best lately to try to make Linux as un-UNIX-like as possible to the point where it's becoming difficult for a desktop environment to even properly compile and run under FreeBSD anymore which is far closer to real UNIX than modern Linux.

That's only true in iOS-land. ;-)

Depends how you have your login and shell profile scripts set up.

In fact, you can plug in a USB->Serial adapter and set up a real VT220 as a secondary console, or if you have a hackintosh with a real serial port, you can just use that.

Or if the machine is set up to ask for a username and password instead of clicking a picture, you can even type '>console' as the user name and drop directly to shell without using terminal.app.

I did. Oops. Still.... that can't be cheap. And I can think of a certain wireless provider that offered unlimited service only to force everyone out of those plans later. I don't trust Verizon any more than AT&T.

Faster connection with 4G just means you'll hit the bandwidth cap faster and pay Verizon for content that should be free.

And this is different from every single commercial UNIX workstation vendor, how?

Solaris was littered with AT&T and badly documented Sun bullshit everywhere.

A/IX is littered with IBM bastardization everywhere.

HP-UX is littered with indescribable horrors.

Digital UNIX/Tru64? Now THAT was bastardization done right.

A/UX was littered with Apple bastardization and undocumented bullshit too, that didn't make it any less interesting.

So yeah, your argument is stupid.

It's pretty easy. First, take it out of the box. You lift the LCD into a proper viewing angle and push the power button. There you go. Unix.

Yup, FiOS isn't as profitable because users won't tolerate overage charges or massive throttling on wired connections but they'll bend over when it comes to wireless. Even though their wireless connections are NOWHERE near as good as wired connections.

Yet in even some of the poorest countries you can get 20Mbit connections with no cap for less money than you pay in the US.

Change "some" to "MOST" and you have a better idea. FTR, I work in this industry.

Exactly, force the government to turn their toys on the rich, cost them money, and then you will see results. Guaranteed.

They only pick on those without the resources to fight back..... which is most of the country now, sadly.

A.) He didn't bring anything down, just told us what we already knew. The only result is that the IT community looks a lot less like tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists.

B.) So, our allies' communications and infrastructure are now considered "behind enemy lines"?

C.) I really do feel slightly safer now, you criminal organization apologist/sympathizer.

And you're doing what, exactly? What's *YOUR* glorious plan for rebuilding the republic and "doing something about it"? Don't have one? Didn't think so.

And I didn't vote for any of these clowns.

Don't want your infrastructure paralyzed? Don't connect it to a global public network.

Afraid the NSA has compromised the infrastructure of your nation? Pull the plug to the rest of the world, isolate your network, reload everything including firmware and have that firmware analyzed byte by byte for potential vulnerabilities. Or buy silent typewriters and use them in soundproof roofs that have been swept for bugs.

These guys have compromised the planet all the way down to the equipment manufacturers. They have themselves endangered national security by injecting such vulnerabilities for the black hat community to discover and enjoy. This has become less about national security and more about manipulation/control of the populace/world. They have overstepped their bounds greatly to the point of being dangerous to the liberty of every man, woman and child on the face of this Earth potentially and very little is being done to put a leash on them.

Seriously, what hasn't the NSA illegally pwned yet? They are conducting organized crime basically and our government has told us to shove it. I'd laugh too. Hell, I might even die laughing. I don't think I'd be able to stop.