Sunday, October 24, 2004

Apple in the Enterprise

Apple's Stupidity - Not Supporting "Third Party" User Space Applications That Cause Kernel Panics "...when Qmail is spam bombed with a flood of emails, the system suffers a kernel panic. Yet, this problem only occurs on dual processor machines! Apple's lovely suggestion - "Oh, just disabled the second processor...Under no circumstances should a userspace application cause the kernel to panic. On Unix, this is just plain unacceptable and represents an issue with something in the kernel or core libraries. Basically, you are saying that any end user has the ability to crash the machine. For example, if I have an account on a Mac OS X box, I can compile qmail and bind it to an unprivileged port. At that point, I can flood the machine with enough requests to crash the system."

That's exactly what we've seen with Kowari/TKS. I like developing on an Apple system, sure it's slow and Apple keep tying upgrades of the JVM to the OS but it's those other productivity benefits that make it worthwhile.

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